pwconv
You can use the pwconv command to convert systems that do not have a shadow password file to use password shadowing. Most (if not all) modern systems would use password shadowing. However, if the /etc/shadow file does not exist, the encrypted password is stripped from /etc/passwd, and is replaced by x, indicating that the password for each user is shadowed. A shadow password file would then be created using the encrypted passwords extracted from the password file.
However, a more common use of pwconv is to update the shadow password file with entries that have been created manually in /etc/passwd. Although this is not the recommended method of adding users to the system, some sites have scripts that create blocks of new user accounts by generating sequential usernames with generic group and password information. In such cases, it would be necessary to run pwconv after the script has been executed, to ensure that entries created in /etc/passwd are correctly transferred to /etc/shadow.
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