What this account is

A shared account for service processes that must own files on disk but need no privileges beyond that. portmap and atd are among the programs that have used it. LSB 1.3 classifies the account as legacy and directs new services to separate accounts of their own.

Source: base-passwd, doc/users-and-groups.sgml, edition 0.2

KindNumberDistribution
GID2Alpine Linux
GID1Debian
UID2Alpine Linux
UID1Debian

Sources

DistributionSource packagePackage versionCommitRead from source
Debianbase-passwd3.6.8a080557e1d592026-08-07
Alpine Linuxalpine-baselayout3.7.2a9c597c5cee02026-08-07