[CentOS] Lost my menu options again - KDE messes with

Tue Oct 4 16:25:02 UTC 2005
Bill Maltby <wild-bill at triad.rr.com>

Dave Gutteridge <dave at tokyocomedy.com> wrote:

> Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2005 23:41:57 +0900 <snip>
>
>>> ----
>>> useradd -p PASSWORD -m roger
>>>           ^ needs a  ^
>>>             space    |
>>>                      | what are you trying to accomplish here?
>
>
>The web page where I got the command said I needed it. Said it was to
>create a home directory.
>
>In any case, I tried:
>useradd -p password testguy
>
>and I still can't log in at the GUI prompt with the username "testguy"
>and the password "password".

I don't know what was on the web page, but when things don't behave as expected, it's always worth looking at a man or info page. In this case, you would see that you did not use the "-p PASSWORD" param correctly. Why? A qualifying phrase often overlooked, "... as returned by crypt(3)". Exactly how they intended to make this administrator-friendly is not apparent to me. I've not easily found a CLI that will return an encrypted version of a proposed password, allowing something like

    passwd -p `encryptit password` ...

'Course, my forte is not administration, so I may be just ignorant (at least, I hope that's all it is  :))  ).

Most folks just byte the bullet, even in scripts, and type it in at the console. Or grab an encrypted starter passwd (possibly copied from /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow (more likely) ?) and use that and specify that passwd must be changed upon initial login.


><snip>

Bill