This manual page documents briefly the unshadow command, which is part of the john package. This manual
page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution because the original program does not have a
manual page. john, better known as John the Ripper, is a tool to find weak passwords of users in a
server.
The unshadow tool combines the passwd and shadow files so John can use them. You might need this since if
you only used your shadow file, the GECOS information wouldn't be used by the "single crack" mode, and
also you wouldn't be able to use the '-shells' option. On a normal system you'll need to run unshadow as
root to be able to read the shadow file.