creating password for a 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 users, because then they will be added to the /etc/passwd|shadow 
file, and my passwd/shadow files are in another directory. These 
passwd/shadow files are used by an ftp server. I have managed to create 
a passwd file, and wrote the user name and uid, and homedir etc... by 
hand. The shadow file's passwords must be encrytped with md5. So I used 
the 'htpasswd' program to create a password for the user.  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, and put to the /etc/shadow file. When I 
try to login with 'user' via ftp (using the newly created shadow file),
it says username and/or password was not accepted, so the password 
generation didn't work.

'htpasswd -bmn user password' output:

user:$apr1$DlJ9I...$E8VL0rjQKdl1pVgH2q10C.

'adduser user' (with same password as above) output:

user:$1$NR.fOvEF$.hOr7l7msiIfz6sP4l0yS/

As you can see they don't match.
So my question is, that is it possible to create passwords for a shadow 
file with a command line tool? Is this htpasswd the right tool for this, 
and I just can not use it? Or if this is not possible, then how can I 
specify another destination shadow/passwd file for the adduser/useradd 
program.

Thanks!

Daniel


--
LeVA