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Standard C Library Functionscrypt(3C)


NAME

 crypt - string encoding function

SYNOPSIS

Default

 
 
#include <crypt.h>
char *crypt(const char *key, const char *salt);

Standard conforming

 
 
#include <unistd.h>
char *crypt(const char *key, const char *salt);

DESCRIPTION

 

The crypt() function is a string encoding function, used primarily for password encryption. It is based on a one-way encryption algorithm with variations intended (among other things) to frustrate use of hardware implementations of a key search.

The key argument points to a string to be encoded (for example, the user's password.) Only the first eight characters are used; the rest are ignored. The salt is a two-character string chosen from the set [a-zA-Z0-9./]. This string is used to perturb the hashing algorithm in one of 4096 different ways.

RETURN VALUES

 

Upon successful completion, crypt() returns a pointer to the encoded string. The first two characters of the returned value are those of the salt argument. Otherwise it returns a null pointer and sets errno to indicate the error.

In multithreaded applications, the return value is a pointer to thread-specific data.

ERRORS

 

The crypt() function will fail if:

ENOSYS
The functionality is not supported on this implementation.

USAGE

 

The return value of crypt() points to static data that is overwritten by each call.

The values returned by this function may not be portable among XSI-conformant systems.

ATTRIBUTES

 

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPEATTRIBUTE VALUE
Interface StabilityStandard
MT-LevelSafe

SEE ALSO

 

passwd(1), crypt(3c), encrypt(3C), getpass(3C), setkey(3C), passwd(4), attributes(5)


SunOS 5.9Go To TopLast Changed 2 May 2001

 
      
      
Copyright 2002 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Use is subject to license terms.