Do NOT Use This Perl Module: Passwd::Unix
Updated: April 29th, 2008
Update: The author of the module contacted me the same day and promised to fix it in the next version. Version 0.40 was indeed on cpan as promised, but I haven't tested it yet.
Passwd::Unix will corrupt your /etc/shadow file and rearrange login names and their corresponding password hashes.
The current version of Passwd::Unix corrupted my /etc/shadow upon only
calling the passwd() function. Immediately users started to report not
being able to login.
After examining the situation, I found that Passwd::Unix rearranges all
users in /etc/shadow in some way, but it only does it to the
usernames, and not the password hashes. Thus, you will get corrupted accounts. Moreover,
users are now able to login to one OTHER account, not their own,
depending on how the usernames got shuffled.
Thankfully, I had a recent backup but I definitely don’t want anyone
else to suffer.
I’m using perl 5.10, SUSE 10.3. If it’s incompatible with SUSE, it needs
to say so and exit.
I've filed the bug here: http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=35323.
You have been warned.
In the meantime, if you found this article useful, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee below.
beer planet is a blog about technology, programming, computers, and geek life. It is run by Artem Russakovskii - a local San Francisco geek who is currently pursuing his own projects and regularly enjoys hacking Android, PHP, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, Perl, and regular expressions, working on Wordpress plugins and tools, tweaking MySQL queries and server settings, administering Linux machines, blogging, learning new things, and other geeky stuff.
