Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 11947
mkpasswd name conflict between shadow-utils and expect
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:55 EDT
PROBLEM: A utility by the name of "mkpasswd" is present in both the expect (as /usr/bin/mkpasswd) and shadow-utils (as /usr/sbin/mkpasswd) packages. This is confusing and could cause obscure failures in anything depending on mkpasswd but using a different PATH. There is also a man page associated with each utility (section 1 for expect, section 8 for shadow-utils). EXAMPLE: $ rpm -qf /usr/bin/mkpasswd expect-5.28-30 $ rpm -qf /usr/sbin/mkpasswd shadow-utils-19990827-2 $ which mkpasswd /usr/bin/mkpasswd $ mkpasswd UTu3mwuw8 $ su - Password: # which mkpasswd /usr/sbin/mkpasswd # mkpasswd mkpasswd: no DBM database on system - no action performed ANALYSIS: mkpasswd from shadow-utils is a system utility, and should not be changed. mkpasswd from expect is simply an example program, albeit a useful one. Renaming it to something like "genpasswd" (generate password) or "mkpasswd-expect" would allow it to continue to be available. AFFECTED RELEASES: I see the problem in Red Hat Linux 6.1 and 6.2. It likely exists in other releases as well. I selected "shadow-utils" as the "Component" for this bug report because "expect" was not listed. (Yes, I am aware you can create new components.) Red Hat may wish to create an "expect" component and attach this bug to it as well (if you can do that).
Thanks, fixed in 7.0. There is no expect component because expect is not a package by itself: rpm -qi `rpm -qf /usr/bin/expect` |grep RPM shows expect is part of the tcltk package (and therefore component).