I know this may sound trivial, but I am just curious as to why 'mkpasswd' fails to function in Slackware--

When I run the 'mkpasswd' command/program here is the error output:
mkpasswd: no DBM database on system - no action performed

Now, I know I did a "full" Slack install...so if anyone could tell me how to make this work or what I am missing. TIA.

JM

That's the ouput you'll get if you run 'mkpasswd' without any parameters. From the 'man' file:

NAME
mkpasswd - Update passwd and group database files

SYNOPSIS
mkpasswd [-fvgps] file

DESCRIPTION
mkpasswd reads the file in the format given by the flags and converts it to
the corresponding database file format. These database files are used to
improve access performance on systems with large numbers of users. The
output files will be named file.dir and file.pag.

Unless you're running a server with a lot of users, you probably don't really need to convert your 'passwd' files to a DB format.

TSJ

If your just wanting to update or change one user or group, I'd suggest just using the regular commands to do this like:

passwd <username>
usermod <username>
groupmod <group>

And so on....