This is a process that I inherited from years of doing it this way. the departments here are so separated, reverse engineering this whole thing would be a nightmare. I agree that hand modifying the passwd file is ridiculous but im not sure working to change this process would get me far. Appending the zero has not caused any ill results over the years until today when someone with sudo privileges accidentally deleted the root line, effectively breaking the whole system. A few hours later and we are back, now we need to limit who touches it, hence the need for a script.

I have something in the works.