Ok, first off, I'm working on a Vmware ESX server, which I guess is loosely based off of Red Hat 9. But I'm brand new to it (today), so be nice.

I'm trying to write a useradd script that will create some users, generate a password, and set their password to this newly generated password.

Now by hand, I can use the useradd command, and then use passwd to change their password. But if I've got to set up a couple hundred users, this is not enjoyable.

So if I can't use passwd in a script (because it requires user interaction), how can I create these users with some default password?