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DBMMANAGE(1) General Commands Manual DBMMANAGE(1)

dbmmanage — create and update user authentication files in DBM format

dbmmanage filename [command] [username [encpassword]]

dbmmanage is used to create and update the DBM format files used to store usernames and passwords for basic authentication of HTTP users. Resources available from the httpd(8) Apache web server can be restricted to just the users listed in the files created by dbmmanage. This program can only be used when the usernames are stored in a DBM file. To use a flat-file database see htpasswd(1).

This manual page only lists the command line arguments. For details of the directives necessary to configure user authentication in httpd(8), see the Apache manual, which can be found in /usr/share/doc/html/httpd/.

The options are as follows:

command
This selects the operation to perform:
Add an entry for username to filename using the encrypted password encpassword.
Ask for a password and then add an entry for username to filename.
Ask for a password and then check if username is in filename and if its password matches the specified one.
Delete the username entry from filename.
Read username:password entries (one per line) from stdin and add them to filename. The password already has to be encrypted.
Same as the adduser command, except that it makes sure username already exists in filename.
Just display the complete contents of the DBM file.
encpassword
The password to be encrypted.
filename
The filename of the DBM format file. Usually without the extension .db, .pag, or .dir.
username
The user for which the update operation is performed.

htdigest(1), htpasswd(1), httpd(8)

One should be aware that there are a number of different DBM file formats in existence, and with all likelihood, libraries for more than one format may exist on your system. The three primary examples are NDBM, the GNU project's GDBM, and Berkeley DB 2. Unfortunately, all these libraries use different file formats, and you must make sure that the file format used by filename is the same format that dbmmanage expects to see. dbmmanage currently has no way of determining what type of DBM file it is looking at. If used against the wrong format, dbmmanage will simply return nothing, or may create a different DBM file with a different name, or at worst, it may corrupt the DBM file if you were attempting to write to it.

dbmmanage has a list of DBM format preferences, defined by the “@AnyDBM::ISA” array near the beginning of the program. Since we prefer the Berkeley DB 2 file format, the order in which dbmmanage will look for system libraries is Berkeley DB 2, then NDBM, and then GDBM. The first library found will be the library dbmmanage will attempt to use for all DBM file transactions. This ordering is slightly different than the standard “@AnyDBM::ISA” ordering in perl(1), as well as the ordering used by the simple dbmopen() call in perl, so if you use any other utilities to manage your DBM files, they must also follow this preference ordering. Similar care must be taken if using programs in other languages, like C, to access these files.

httpd(8)'s mod_auth_db.c module corresponds to the Berkeley DB 2 library, while mod_auth_dbm.c corresponds to the NDBM library. Also, one can usually use the file(1) program supplied with most UNIX systems to see what format a DBM file is in.

June 7, 2008 OpenBSD-5.1