From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.6a) Gecko/20031018 Description of problem: A space at the end of a line in /etc/passwd will cause that shell to fail. This would obviously happen by accident; however it is not something that vipw checks for on user accounts. The error message obtained after setting a shell of "/bin/bash " for a user is: su: /bin/bash : No such file or directory Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): setup-2.5.27-1.1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.use vipw to enter a space after a shell in /etc/passwd 2. su - to the user, whose shell has been altered 3. The result is su: /bin/bash : No such file or directory Actual Results: The user no longer has a valid shell. Expected Results: An extra space would be ignored or vipw could at least check the termination of the lines for a space. Additional info:
Ignoring it would be a bug. Assigning for possibly checking that there
vipw doesn't do any checking. This gives the administrator the maximum flexibility when editing the password file. This also makes the administrator responsible for the information they enter. :) This is pretty much a "don't do that" situation.