Conference turris::digital_unix

9038.0. "Change Password for many users ?" by NETRIX::"[email protected]. co.kr" (Seung-Joo Lee) Wed Mar 05 1997 09:04

I'd like to add 20,000 login accounts for University's students. 
I have a database of them. There are username, home directory and 
initial password in the DBfile. 

It is simple to add 20,000 login accounts with shell script
like the following;
 1. Shell Script File, add.sh:
 ----------
 while :
 do
    read USERNAME HOMEDIR
    /usr/sbin/useradd -m -d $HOMEDIR/$USERNAME $USERNAME
 done
 -----------
 2. Run :
 $ add.sh < DBfile
 where DBfile consists of 20,000 lines with user name and home directory. 
This script works well.

But, useradd command does not have password string option.
And when I tried to change password of a user with passwd command 
and redirection it does not work. That was;
 $ passwd userid < passwordfile
 where passwordfile have two same strings in two lines.

By the way it is impossible to set manually initial password 
with passwd command for 20,000 accounts.

My customer want to set password for each 20,000 userid.
Do you have any idea?

Regards.

Seung-Joo Lee
TS, Digital Korea
[email protected]
[Posted by WWW Notes gateway]

A bourn shell script can't run /bin/passwd.  It can invoke
an expect script which can interface with /bin/passwd to 
set the password.

The easiest way to do this is with a Perl script. Perl has 
a crypt function and can generate the passwd field bypassing
/bin/passwd.

[Posted by WWW Notes gateway]