I need to automate some commands in my linux box. Primarily the htpasswd command for mini_httpd. I was wondering if there was a way to pass human interaction aurguments via some command operator....

The command I want to automate is
:#htpasswd .htpasswd (password file) admin (user)
New password for admin: Type password here
Retype password for admin Type password here

Maybe you could use expect (http://expect.nist.gov/)

htpasswd will also take the password as an argument.

In the mini_httpd version of htpasswd, there is no option to pass the argument password.

Although that expect program looks totally rad, I wont have tcl in my embedded system

Does the mini_httpd version of htpassswd so anything different from that of apache? You could also write a simple perl script to do the encryption if you have perl installed.

i do have perl installed, but unfortunatly im developing on a system of a different arch than the target, so i only have the main perl binary with nothing else. the perl binary i jacked off of the net and it was all i could find. (its a uclibc system if you're curious) so if you know of way of scripting it with the basic perl installed you would be gold!

So i figured out what to do! if anyone for whatever reason is ever in the same situation as I, then here it is

In the htpasswd.c file of the mini_httpd source there is an if statement telling the session to prompt for a password and then to get the user to retype the password. Comment out the lines pertaining to retyping the password (which is done by puting a // in front of everyline) then recompile the program and issue the command:

%echo (your password here) | ./htpasswd -c (password file) (user name)

and BAM! its done

We wrote that command into a system call within a perl script and it works AOK!