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3 Responses to “Do NOT Use This Perl Module: Passwd::Unix”

3 Comments:
1. joe says:

   May 27, 2008 at 5:08 am

   What have you used instead ?
   Did you write your own ?

   Reply
2. Artem Russakovskii says:

   May 27, 2008 at 1:24 pm

   joe, yeah, I ended up writing my own version which has worked well so far. If I were writing new code though, I would give Passwd::Unix another try since the author rewrote it after my bug report.

   For reference, here's the code I've come up with:

   1	system("echo '$username:$password' | chpasswd") && die "Oops, there was some error setting the password!";

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3. Jason says:

   February 9, 2009 at 10:53 pm

   I'm using v0.40 Passwd::Unix qw(uid encpass passwd) without any problems.

   I would recommend against using Artem's example of system("echo stuff | passwordprogram") since that will show up in the ps -eF output….

   There are other methods open a pipe to a program where your password won't be viewable non-root users. In Perl you can use
   
open(HANDLE,">","|chpasswd") || die "$!\n";
print HANDLE "$username:$password";

   In PHP you can use popoen() or proc_open()

   Reply