Ian Melnick wrote: > > I have a script for generating certain types of user accounts for my > network. I want to assign random initial passwords to every new user, > that they can change on their own later. I decided to generate them with > makepasswd. The question is, how can I tell passwd to use this password > for the new user without manually typing it in? Is there a way I can > script it? I have not given this too much thought. So take this as brainstorming and not really an answer. Have the adduser command build the account initially disabled. Use 'adduser --disabled-password' to do that. Use a perl script to take the plain text password and convert it to the encrypted text string. I don't know of a command that does that directly. But you can build it up in perl quite easily. Use 'usermod -p string user' to update the account information in /etc/shadow (or /etc/passwd if you are doing it the old way) with the prebuilt string. Bob
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