Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello friends,

We have encrypted password strings for all of our users (each user has different password).

After creating users in Linux, we replace encrypted passwords manually on /etc/shadow so that their passwords directly work. Instead we want to do it using scripting.

I tried with sed but doesn't work. Could anyone please provide me correct sed syntax (or any other solution) to replace encrypted passwords.

Eg.:

Code:

FROM:
user999:!!:15794:0:99999:7:::

TO:
user999:$1$Mw1IOuBn$WoxkBG1r9m/3nqT/lgDm7/:15794:0:99999:7:::

Basically we need to replace the 2nd field (colon separated) with the encrypted password

Thanks

---------- Post updated at 08:05 PM ---------- Previous update was at 06:25 PM ----------

Never Mind.

I managed to get it done by using awk - something like...

Code:

awk -F":" 'BEGIN{OFS=":"}{if($1 == "${username}"){$2="${encpass}";print}}'

I'd suggest one more thing:

BACK UP THE FILE before you replace it. If you wreck your shadow file that's pretty hard to fix.

Have you considered using line Linux usermod command

Code:

# usermod -p '$1$Mw1IOuBn$WoxkBG1r9m/3nqT/lgDm7/' test999

Or using the -p option with useradd when then users are originally created.