Previous Next Contents

4.2 Directory based configuration

More flexible than the single configuration file, as of version 0.56, it is possible to configure libpam via the contents of the /etc/pam.d/ directory. In this case the directory is filled with files each of which has a filename equal to a service-name (in lower-case): it is the personal configuration file for the named service. The existence of an /etc/pam.d/ directory means libpam will completely ignore the contents of /etc/pam.conf.

The syntax of this file is similar to that of the /etc/pam.conf file and is made up of lines of the following form:

module-type   control-flag   module-path   arguments
The only difference being that the service-name is not present. The service name is known for the file to have been read by libpam.

This method of configuration has a number of advantages over the single file approach. We list them here to assist the reader in deciding which scheme to adopt:


Previous Next Contents