On Thu, Jul 10, 2014, at 12:46 AM, William wrote:
Under what conditions are these two files created / touched?
When systemd-sysusers is run.
When I install a package and add a file to this sysuser directory,
is
only that user added to passwd and shadow?
The answer to this is pretty simple; systemd-sysusers does nothing if
the user already exists. It has built-in idempotency. Contrast with
the fact that shadow-utils doesn't, so all of the RPM %pre scripts
duplicate it in shell.
Is there a way to disable or remove a system user from being added
to /etc/shadow?
Why?
Are changes to shadow/passwd made by a user respected / preserved (IE
to
a user account)?
Yes.
What happens if a human edits the system account generated by
systemd,
do the changes get lost?
See above; if you edit the passwd entry post-creation, systemd won't
change it.