Linux System - Table 12 > Packages - Table 10 > passwd

Passwd is a text file, that contains a list of the system's accounts, giving for each account some useful information like user ID, group ID, home directory, shell, etc. Often, it also contains the encrypted passwords for each account. It should have general read permission (many utilities, like ls(1) use it to map user IDs to user names), but write access only for the superuser.