I need to change 1000+ individuals passwords back to a default password. As much as I would love to give this to my backup to do by hand, I am just not that cruel. I need an easy way to do this. In Solaris I can do this by using "pass username passwd", but I can't figure out how to do the same thing in RH Linux 7.2. I have done this in the past but I can't remember how I did it.

Any assistance would be GREATLY appreciated.

`man passwd'

generally it's

`passwd <username>'
<old password (if you're not root)>
<newpassword>
<newpassword again>

Not sure how easy you'll think this is but this sort of problem is exactly the sort of thing that the `expect' scripting language was designed for (automating the use of interactive programs). In fact, many of Don Libes's early examples of using expect involved tasks where one was dinking around with passwords. I think an relatively short expect script invoked repeatedly within a simple shell script that reads /etc/passwd for the user account names would be the simplest. And you'd need to run this as root since your changing other user's passwords. Finally, make sure you only do this for regular users; parse /etc/passwd for, say, members of the `users' group, group numbers greater than N, or something like that. You don't want to go changing root's password to ``ChangeMe'' and some accounts should never have a valid password.

Good luck,

Rick

OK I figured out how I did it and it is extremely easy.

chpasswd with a file that contains the username:password pairs.

it is actually pretty quick.

Thanks for all who replied.

Theresa