What does it mean when a logon/username ends in a $

Question

I am trying to hide certain user names from the the lightdm login screen (Ubuntu 11.10) I have found a work round by messing with uid's. In getting this solution I have found in my /etc/passwd file a user name ending in $ sign,what does this mean?

Answer 1

If you are running Samba in domain controller mode (NT4), usernames ending with a "$" usually mean a (Windows) machine account joined to the domain.

Samba uses this to distinguish machine accounts from user accounts.

http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/using_samba/ch04.html#FNPTR-2

Answer 2

Can you past an example ? My guess with your user name would be a typo.

At any rate, to hide users in lightdm, edit /etc/lightdm/users.conf

# Graphical
gksu gedit /etc/lightdm/users.conf

# command line
sudo -e /etc/lightdm/users.conf

To hide only some users add to the "hidden-users" line

hidden-users=nobody nobody4 noaccess user1 user2

Users are separated by a space ;)

To hide all users use

greeter-hide-users=true

As it turns out , there is a bug in lightdm such that it does not honor those settings in 11.10 or 12.04

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/accountsservice/+bug/857651

While you are there, add yourself to the "affects me too"

You can , however, work around this by editing /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf and adding the line (under [SeatDefaults] )

[SeatDefaults]
greeter-hide-users=true