i have tried what user name and password i can think of but still no answer. i can get into root and was hoping that i could find it in there. But no luck so far. Anyone have any suggestions?
thanks
randog

Recovering the password is difficult or impossible, but also unnecessary; root can reset a user's password. To find the user name, cat /etc/passwd. Look for a familiar user name near the end of that file, then use the passwd utility (as root) to reset the password fot that user name. Be careful to select only the username you are actually looking for; there are many others in /etc/passwd, and you probably want to leave those alone. See cat and passwd manual pages; "man cat" and "man passwd". It's practically a mantra of mine: man is your friend.

Good luck!

I would have said "impossible"......As the man says, just give the user a new password (or create a new user)

man passwd
man adduser
man usermod

man -k user
man -k password
(The last two illustrate how to search the man pages for keywords.)