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    Bear in mind that not all operating systems have a "shadow" file, and those that do differ in the flag conventions for "locked" accounts. This question is actually specific, per the reference to !, to the shadow password mechanism in Linux operating systems. Commented Nov 1, 2018 at 13:44
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    Only until those distributions adopt replacement systems such as tcb from OpenWall or an implementation of Daniel Rench's userdir, or someone decides to employ LDAP. (-: Commented Nov 1, 2018 at 14:02
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    Useless use of cat; grep can take a file as a command line argument. Commented Nov 1, 2018 at 21:48
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    Useless use of grep too; awk is perfectly capable of finding a string in a file. Commented Nov 1, 2018 at 22:07
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    @PatrickMevzek I'm guessing DavDav meant to ask if the first character of the field that normally stores the password hash (not the password itself) is a !. So, you're technically right, but that seems like a typo in the question rather than a flaw in the underlying intent. Commented Nov 1, 2018 at 23:16