See perldoc -f crypt.

Quote:

crypt PLAINTEXT, SALT
Where PLAINTEXT is the password in this case
Where SALT is a two character string, matches regexp /[./0-9A-Za-z]{2}/

Many people use seconds to come up with a SALT string but in a tight loop you may pull the the same second. Do something with this...

Code:

sub fractime () {
  use Time::HiRes qw ( time );
  my $now = time;
  $now -= int($now);
  return $now;
}

That will give you a factional time where you can use string operators to suck out two digits at a time and the modulo them to the set of 64 characters available for the SALT with...

Code:

sub randsalt($) {
  my ($fractime) = @_;

  my $saltset = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789./';
  my $salt = "";
  for (my $i = 0; $i < 2; ++$i) {
    my $s = substr($fractime, ($i * 2) + 2, 2) % length($saltset);
    $salt .= substr($saltset, $s, 1);
  }
  return $salt;
}

So we call these two functions in Perl and return the password.

Code:

my $ft = fractime();
#print $ft, "\n";
my $salt = randsalt($ft);
#print $salt, "\n";
print crypt($ARGV[0], $salt), "\n";

See attachment for Perl code and remember to 'chmod' it. We can now get the proper password in BASH with...

Code:

#!/bin/bash
PASS=$(./test8.pl somepassword)

I tested the 'useradd' command and it worked correctly with adding the account under Fedora12. Sorry for the hedge bet but the documentation says the default '-p' option is to disable the account? This sounds strange.

Good Luck.