From owner-freebsd-questions Wed May 5 12: 4:36 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from cygnus.rush.net (cygnus.rush.net [209.45.245.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7C47C158E7 for ; Wed, 5 May 1999 12:04:27 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bright@rush.net) Received: from localhost (bright@localhost) by cygnus.rush.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id OAA14831; Wed, 5 May 1999 14:24:56 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 5 May 1999 14:24:54 -0500 (EST) From: Alfred Perlstein To: Peter Brezny Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: /etc/passwd In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 5 May 1999, Peter Brezny wrote: > why when i make changes to /etc/passwd using pico, things visibly change, > but changing someone's shell from nologin to bash seems to make no > functional changes. > > i've been clued into using vipw, however, isn't there a way to edit this > file functionally using any old text editor? vipw is just a wrapper for editing the password file, you can just do this: export EDITOR="pico -w" then run vipw. btw, i _strongly_ encourage you to learn vi, pico just doesn't cut it and can cause problems when you edit files with strict whitespace guidlines (like /etc/passwd) -Alfred To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message