Hi,

I am currently writing a shell script that asks for the starting and ending sequence of users. Based on that, my shell script is able to create the users. This part is working perfectly well. let me put down the code of the script for you:-

echo "Please enter starting student number"
read sno
echo "Please enter ending student number"
read eno
while [ $sno -le $eno ]
do
tmpusr=`echo j2ee$sno`
useradd $tmpusr
sno=`expr $sno + 1`
done


I want to modify this script in such a way that the user's password should be set to elmaqedu. I tried to put the code passwd $tmpusr elmaqedu but it did not work. could somebody help me with this small piece of code?

You could do this via the -p option in useradd. You'll have to find out what the crypt'd password is in order to use it, but you can do it that was as well.

man useradd

Hi,

I tried the useradd with the -p option. It was putting it in clear text in the /etc/shadow file. then i went thru the man pages. it told me that the -p option requires the password generated by crypt. so, i tried the command grub-md5-crypt and gave my password. It gave me an encrypted form of the password. When i tried to copy and paste it into my code, it further got encrypted into something else. probably it is not usng md5 but something else. Please do let me know.

Well, I already said that it required it to be cyprted, although you did read the man page, so that's a plus! :-)

Here's a sneaky tricky way to do it.

At the command prompt, type passwd Enter the password you want the other users to have. Look in /etc/shadow at what the newly crypted password is, copy the entire string ( of the password, not the entire /etc/shadow string for the user ), then type passwd again, change the password back to your old password, and you now have the crypted string in which to put with the -p option.

Ta-Da

There may be some utility out there that gives you an md5 string/crypted/thing-a-ma-jig, but it's just as easy to do it the way I just suggested.