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Comment by princekolt | Hacker News Reader

Bad news: I tried the exploit in my macOS Sierra installation and it didn't seem to work. However, the passwd entry on the output of your first command IS A LONE ASTERISK.

However I still can't login as root. This leads me to believe this behavior has always been there, and maybe the login methods just didn't allow an empty password.

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This is very normal in 'nix' systems. '' indicates a locked account. (I've given up figuring out how to escape an asterisk)

ex:

  daemon:*:1:1::0:0:Owner of many system processes:/root:/usr/sbin/nologin
  operator:*:2:5::0:0:System &:/:/usr/sbin/nologin
  bin:*:3:7::0:0:Binaries Commands and Source:/:/usr/sbin/nologin
  tty:*:4:65533::0:0:Tty Sandbox:/:/usr/sbin/nologin

If the OS is letting you in with a '*'in the encrypted password field, something is very very wrong.

I'm confused, why do you have to escape an asterisk?

He's stuck inside

wildcard.

Markdown in HN comments.

Famous last words of a Roman centurion.

Nah, I've never seen them do worse than knock people out. Probably the next thing the centurion said was "Ow, what hit me!".

Only High Sierra is affected.

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