Bug 7660

Summary: useradd -p enters plain text password
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Adi Linden <adi>
Component: shadow-utilsAssignee: Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <bero>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 6.1   
Target Milestone: ---   
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Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 1999-12-08 15:15:45 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Adi Linden 1999-12-07 19:34:57 UTC 
When using the -p command line switch with useradd a plain text password is
added in /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow and not an encrypted password. After
using useradd a user connot log in with the password supplied to useradd,
the passwd command has to be run to update the passwd properly.
Comment 1 Bernhard Rosenkraenzer 1999-12-08 15:15:59 UTC 
useradd -p takes the *encrypted* password as parameter.
Allowing to specify cleartext passwords in the command line would not be a very
good idea (anyone can read it, and it remains in .bash_history).

If you absolutely need that function, use something along the lines of

useradd -p `echo 'print crypt("password", "RH");' | perl` username