Hi guys,

I'm building a bash script where I need to change the current user's password, so it's not a script that's being run by root only, but by any user alone.

After searching a while on the net I found two main options:

Unfortunately the first doesn't work for me because I'm on ubuntu and passwd does not have the --stdin option (apparently) and the second only works when I'm logged in as root; I doesn't seem to have the required privileges to change a user's password when logged in with it.

Now I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with prompting the password from passwd directly, but I would need a way to catch that password because I'm using it in other parts of the script as well.

Any ideas? Thanks!

PS: This is my first post here.

Welcome. And it's a good idea to search the forums here first for such things, as they've probably been asked/answered before. This thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...a-user-830507/

has a script I wrote to do command-line password changing. It may work for you.

Thanks for answering TB0ne.

As a matter of fact I actually saw a few topics (including from this forum) before asking this question. The code you posted in your liked thread is for adding, I have that. What I want is to edit an already existent user's password.

And I even mentioned that topic's solution in my question, I can't use "passwd --stdin" because my version of linux/passwd does not support --stdin.

So I'm back at square one.

Since chpasswd requires root access, just passwd is left from what I know.

So I run passwd normally in my script, and the user is prompted normally from it, there are two scenarios that would seem logical:

- If there was a way to catch the prompted value, something like "the last user input" or so...
- If there was a way to catch the prompting itself and fetch it a previously inputted password (from a script variable), without the user actually seeing the prompt.

Is any of this possible? Or something else? Thanks!

Hi,

You can try the following hack. Set the suid bit on chpasswd:
so it can be run by a regular user (just as the normal passwd) and use your 2nd echo command.
FYI this worked on a Suse box, but it didn't on Slackware, so I don't know what happens with Ubuntu.

1 members found this post helpful.

How do you figure that??

Just slightly modify the script. Since my script takes the password variable from command line, and uses the standard "useradd" command to set/modify the password at creation time, just change the command to be "usermod" instead, and set it with the right parameters, which you can find from the man page on usermod. Not alot to it.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hmm, yes I haven't thought about usermod.

I tried it and however I get this error: "usermod: cannot lock /etc/passwd; try again later.".

Keep in mind that I want this script to be run by the user itself and not by the root user.

@bathory: If this doesn't work I'll try your little hack, thanks.

Do both...the usermod command will have to be set that way to work from a 'regular' user account too.