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From: james@jraynard.demon.co.uk (James Raynard)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Problem with CHPASS?
Date: 23 May 1996 21:44:33 -0000
Organization: A FreeBSD Box
Lines: 40
Message-ID: <4o2m81$4l1@jraynard.demon.co.uk>
References: <dhawkDr57Ko.LJ5@netcom.com> <319b67b4.5860692@news.aei.ca> <31A12443.4A86@tassie.net.au>
NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.demon.co.uk
X-NNTP-Posting-Host: jraynard.demon.co.uk
In article <31A12443.4A86@tassie.net.au>,
Brook Schofield <Brook@tassie.net.au> wrote:
>
>chpass -p $1$thotuh$htnhut brook
>
>but the password isn't being changed!!!
>
>If there is anyone that knows why this is happening...
Yep, $ is a shell metacharacter (a magic symbol in plain English) and
the shell is trying to interpret it. Put single quotes around the
password:-
chpass -p '$1$thotuh$htnhut' brook
to make the shell ignore it.
>or an easy way to update the master.password file easily... or
especially in Perl.
I've just looked at the source, and it's not that straightforward - at
least not if you take stuff like YP/NIS into account.
If you have a steady hand, and you don't mind using vi, 'vipw' is
slightly more comfortable than using chpass, as you can do all sorts
of things like search-and-replace-by-regexp.
Generating passwords in Perl is easy:-
perl -e 'print crypt("foobar", "123");'
(again you need quotes, this time because of the brackets).
I'd recommend choosing a slightly less obvious salt and password,
though. 8-)
--
James Raynard, Edinburgh, Scotland
jraynard@dial.pipex.com
james@jraynard.demon.co.uk