Which character in the password field of /etc/passwd is used to indicate that the encrypted password is stored in /etc/shadow?
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A. B. C. D.D
The correct answer is D. x.
In Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, user account information is stored in the /etc/passwd file. This file contains one line of information for each user account, and each line is divided into seven fields separated by colons (:). The fields are as follows:
username:password:UID:GID:GECOS:home_directory:shell
The second field, password, contains a hashed or encrypted version of the user's password. In the past, this field used to contain the actual password in plaintext, but this was deemed insecure, and most modern Linux distributions now store the hashed password in the /etc/shadow file instead.
To indicate that the encrypted password is stored in the /etc/shadow file, the password field in /etc/passwd is set to the letter "x". This is because the "x" character indicates that the password is not stored in /etc/passwd, but in a separate file, which is /etc/shadow in this case.
So, the correct answer to the question is D, "x".