I am using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and here are the details:
uname -a
3.10.0-327.22.2.e17.x86_64
When I check permissions on the shadow file I see the following:
ls -l /etc/shadow
----------. 1 root root 1467 /etc/shadow
I am surprised to see these permissions. I would think that 'passwd' would need at least read/write permissions for the owner to update this file. Any idea what is going on here?