NAME | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | NOTES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON
NSCD(8) Linux Programmer's Manual NSCD(8)
/usr/sbin/nscd - name service cache daemon
Nscd is a daemon that provides a cache for the most common name service
requests. The default configuration file, /etc/nscd.conf, determines the
behavior of the cache daemon. See nscd.conf(5).
Nscd provides caching for accesses of the passwd(5), group(5), and hosts(5)
databases through standard libc interfaces, such as getpwnam(3), getpwuid(3),
getgrnam(3), getgrgid(3), gethostbyname(3), and others.
There are two caches for each database: a positive one for items found, and a
negative one for items not found. Each cache has a separate TTL (time-to-
live) period for its data. Note that the shadow file is specifically not
cached. getspnam(3) calls remain uncached as a result.
--help will give you a list with all options and what they do.
The daemon will try to watch for changes in configuration files appropriate
for each database (e.g. /etc/passwd for the passwd database or /etc/hosts and
/etc/resolv.conf for the hosts database), and flush the cache when these are
changed. However, this will happen only after a short delay (unless the
inotify(7) mechanism is available and glibc 2.9 or later is available), and
this auto-detection does not cover configuration files required by non-
standard NSS modules, if any are specified in /etc/nsswitch.conf. In that
case, you need to run the following command after changing the configuration
file of the database so that nscd invalidates its cache:
$ nscd -i <database>
nscd.conf(5), nsswitch.conf(5)
This page is part of release 3.23 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found
at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
GNU 2008-12-05 NSCD(8)