Re: passwd: Permission denied ?

[Chris Davies <chris-usenet@roaima.co.uk>]

Frank Bonnet <f.bonnet@esiee.fr> wrote:
> I'm trying to change a local user passwd as root and I get this error 
> message ... which seems a bit unreal to me ...

> passwd: Permission denied

Suspect you've lost the setuid permission bit on /usr/bin/passwd:

    ls -l /usr/bin/passwd
    -rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 34392 2009-05-22 16:03 /usr/bin/passwd

If you don't see an 's' in the fourth character position then that's
the problem, and you can fix it with these commands run as root:

    chown root:root /usr/bin/passwd
    chmod u=rwx,go=rx,u+s /usr/bin/passwd	# 4755 if you insist

Chris