change password

[Tushar Sinha]

How can I change the password of a user from a "C" program

[Kalle Olavi Niemitalo]

[email]tusharsinha@adityabirla.com[/email] (Tushar Sinha) writes:

> How can I change the password of a user from a "C" program

I believe the usual solution is to run the "passwd" program and
feed the correct data to it via a pipe or pty. See the "passwd
chat" parameter of Samba, for example.

If your program runs with root permissions, it can alter
/etc/passwd or /etc/shadow directly; but then you need to
carefully lock the file from other programs, and you won't
know if the new password also has to be saved in other places,
such as Samba or NIS.

With Linux-PAM, the pam_chauthtok function may be able to change
the password. I haven't tried it myself.