[19683] in Athena Bugs
Re: serious PWOG problem with quick fix
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Wed Aug 22 10:43:01 2001
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 10:42:55 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200108221442.KAA26908@multics.mit.edu>
To: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@mit.edu>
CC: aurora@mit.edu, bugs@mit.edu, source-developers@mit.edu
In-reply-to: "[19648] in Athena Bugs"
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
| over the last week or so several poeple have accident;y blown away
| their passwd file on linux boxes.
|
| they were following the instructions:
|
| hesinfo username passwd >> /etc/passwd.local
|
| the problem is that passwd.local is apparently not always created on
I think, after all these years, it would be a good idea to stop the
practice of having users edit the password file(s) by hand, and provide
a helper utility to deal with these cases.
Do others agree?
--jhawk
| linux machines, and bash which is the default root shell on linux
| happily creates the file rather than whining at the user that he file
| doesn't exist (like we're used to with tcsh on other platforms). Can
| we get a quick update to tell people to double check that the file
| exists first or something? There is no problem with /etc/passwd,
| since that always exists, it's just that when passwd.local gets
| created with a single entry and then later gets copied over passwd,
| people get hurt.
