creating password for shadow file

[LeVA <leva@az.isten.hu>]

Hello!

I need to add users to a passwd/shadow file, but these files does not 
reside in /etc dir. Thus I can not use the adduser or useradd tool to 
add the user, because they will add it to the /etc/passwd|shadow file. I 
managed to create a passwd file, and wrote the user name and uid, and 
homedir etc... by hand. After that I used htpasswd program to create a 
passwd for the user. This passwd/shadow files are used by an ftp server. 
And the shadow file must be encrytped with md5. So I typed:

htpasswd -m shadow.ftp user

The problem is that this program doesn't create a password like the 
adduser program used to create. When I try to login with 'user' via ftp, 
it says username and/or password was not accepted, so the passwd 
generation didn't work.

My question: Is it possible to create passwords for shadow file with a 
command line tool? Is this htpasswd the right tool for this? Or if this 
is not possible, then how can I specify another destination 
shadow/passwd file for the adduser/useradd program.

Thanks!


--
LeVA