Comment by tremon

I thought they had a difference in meaning, i.e. * means the user has no password and ! means that password logins are disabled for this user, but the man page does not make it clear if there's a distinction.

From man 5 shadow:

> A password field which starts with an exclamation mark means that the password is locked.

> If the password field contains some string that is not a valid result of crypt(3), for instance ! or *, the user will not be able to use a unix password to log in (but the user may log in the system by other means).