Trying to understand .pacnew files

[anon3337769]

Something I posted in another thread; forgive me for quoting rather than re-typing everything.

@anon3337769

Note that there are a few files that you should always leave alone unless there are specific instructions to merge with a pacnew. These files include:

passwd
shadow
gshadow
group

(and probably a couple more that I can’t think of offhand)

The pacnews for the above files will basically just be empty defaults; the ones on your computer have your user and password information, so you never want to overwrite them. Unless specifically instructed (via the Arch news page) to do otherwise, the best action for these pacnew files is to simply delete them.