Using the "mkpasswd" Command to Index /etc/passwd

Audience: All

Date: March 26, 2002

The /etc/passwd file can become a performance bottleneck on Unix systems with a large number of users. The problem is that Unix must read the file serially from start to finish till it finds the user id.

You can address this bottleneck in AIX by indexing the /etc/passwd and /etc/security/passwd files. To index these files, simply run the mkpasswd -c command. For more information, see

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/doc_link/en_US/a_doc_lib/cmds/aixcmds3/mkpasswd.htm