`id -P` usage survey
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Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2025 04:48:55 UTC
Hi, I was looking at using `id -P` and was surprised to learn that it will in-fact dump out password hashes when run as root. I'm not really proposing coercing them to '*', but I am curious to hear from anyone that uses `id -P` about their use-cases. In my case, I was planning to use it to build a slimmed down master.passwd into a chroot for some test cases, but for something like that I'd be tempted to add a `--sanitized` option or second level of `-P` to suppress the hashes of users I grab from the host (mostly to avoid taking some unnecessary risk of, e.g., them ending up getting leaked into some test results output or something with non-Kyua test runners). Right now I post-process them to strip the field, but I'd love to nix the extra step. OTOH, I guess I'm already requiring the unprivileged-user to be configured for these tests, so I could `su -m $unpriv_user -c 'id -P tests'` instead. Thanks, Kyle Evans