Shell Programming and Scripting

Hey guys i need help i have a script to push a password to a remote server the only problem is the $ENCRYPT variable has $'s in it (from the encrypted password in the shadow file) and they drop out when apending to the shadow file via the usermod command so

$1$Q/6a08n$EoAcBuR/YnoCQC shows up as

/6a08noAcBuR/YnoCQC


#!/bin/bash

userid=${1}
echo $userid
SHADOW=/etc/shadow
system=${2}

SHADOWENTRY=`grep "${userid}" ${SHADOW}`
echo ${SHADOWENTRY}

ENCRYPT=`echo ${SHADOWENTRY} | awk -F: '{print $2}'`
echo ${ENCRYPT}

ssh $system /usr/sbin/usermod -p ${ENCRYPT} ${userid}



Any help would be appreciated.

Sean

To answer your question and keeping it within your script, one way of doing it is to run that string through sed and append a \ before each $.
I would do something like:

Code:

 ENCRYPT=$(grep ${userid} /etc/shadow | awk -F: '{print $2}' | sed 's/\$/\\\$/g')

When you echo ${ENCRYPT} locally, you'll see the whole string with the \ added before the $, but when you do the same remotely through ssh, you'll see the original string as it is in /etc/shadow

Now, I don't know how many times you need to do this, or with how many users, so depending on the circumstances, so there may be other better ways of doing what you need to do.

Here is a great resource written by Bruce Barnett
UNIX SHELL Quote Tutorial
I think this will help you to understand how to avoid such problems

That worked out great thank you guys for your help.