reset everyone's passwords

[Aaron1940]

Anyone know the command for resetting all user's passwords, so that when they first login that will have to change it.

Using Redhat ES

thanks

PS I'm a newbie

-Aaron

 

[KenCunningham]

In flavours I've used passwd -f <username> will force the user to change their password when they log in the next time. Does this suit your need?

 

[Aaron1940]

thats great, but what if i have to do that for 800 user accounts?

-Aaron

 

[pcunix]

You write a script to loop through them:

for i in `cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd`
#probably DON'T want to do this!!
do
passwd -f $i
done

But you'd need to be more complicated because there are definitely accounts you don't waant to do that to. So..

cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd > somefile


# edit somefile to leave desired members

for i in `cat somefile`
do
passwd -f $i
done

Tony Lawrence
Linux/Unix/Mac OS X Resources

http://aplawrence.com

 

[Aaron1940]

Wow thats perfect, thank you guys.

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

Personally, I'd prefer to see

while read i
do
  passwd -f $i
done < somefile

Just so that we don't try to expand the whole thing in memory at once.

It's probably not a serious issue here but the principle is more important generally.

Better to read on thing at a time and process it than try to read it all at once and then process each record.

One at a time you can process any amount of data. All at once you're limited with memory (particularly if there is a low per user/process limit).


Trojan.

 

[pcunix]

That's excellent advice, though with 800 names I doubt he'd see a problem (maybe 8k of memory needed at most? But probably less).

But it's good to keep that in mind as general advice. I tend to forget that construct until I screw up and cat something so humongous as to cause me instant regret

Tony Lawrence
Linux/Unix/Mac OS X Resources

http://aplawrence.com