A resposta está na página do manual nsswitch.conf(5)
:
Interaction with +/- syntax (compat mode)
Linux libc5 without NYS does not have the name service switch but does allow the user some policy control. In
/etc/passwd
you could have entries of the form+user
or+@netgroup
(include the specified user from the NIS passwd map),-user
or-@netgroup
(exclude the specified user), and+
(include every user, except the excluded ones, from the NIS passwd map).You can override certain passwd fields for a particular user from the NIS passwd map by using the extended form of
+user::::::
in /etc/passwd. Non-empty fields override information in the NIS passwd map.Since most people only put a
+
at the end of /etc/passwd to include everything from NIS, the switch provides a faster alternative for this case (passwd: files nis
) which doesn’t require the single+
entry in/etc/passwd
,/etc/group
, and/etc/shadow
. If this is not sufficient, the NSScompat
service provides full +/- semantics. By default, the source isnis
, but this may be overridden by specifyingnisplus
as source for the pseudo-databasespasswd_compat
,group_compat
andshadow_compat
. These pseudo-databases are only available in GNU C Library.
Supondo que seu /etc/nsswitch.conf
contenha passwd: compat
, acredito que essa linha significa "inclua todos os usuários do NIS, mas substitua o shell de login por /bin/bash
".