Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 545053
passwd fails with obscure message when line in /etc/shadow missing
Last modified: 2010-11-04 04:06:26 EDT
If a user's entry is missing in /etc/shadow (although present in /etc/passwd) then trying to set the password for that user fails: # passwd somebody Changing password for user somebody. New password: Retype new password: passwd: Authentication token manipulation error If you manually add a line to /etc/shadow then passwd succeeds. This bug report is for two suggestions: - Firstly, if the line is missing in /etc/shadow then the error message should say that - the existing message is not very informative. - But better would be that passwd(1) knows to add a new line to /etc/shadow if setting the password for a user for the first time. Of course adduser(1) adds the line but making passwd(1) more robust would avoid some headscratching in case the various files get out of sync.
This must be fixed in pam_unix.
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