From owner-freebsd-questions Wed May 5 16:30:10 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from allegro.lemis.com (allegro.lemis.com [192.109.197.134]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4FC0C14F46 for ; Wed, 5 May 1999 16:30:05 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@freebie.lemis.com) Received: from freebie.lemis.com (freebie.lemis.com [192.109.197.137]) by allegro.lemis.com (8.9.1/8.9.0) with ESMTP id JAA20626; Thu, 6 May 1999 09:00:03 +0930 (CST) Received: (from grog@localhost) by freebie.lemis.com (8.9.3/8.9.0) id JAA54457; Thu, 6 May 1999 09:00:02 +0930 (CST) Date: Thu, 6 May 1999 09:00:02 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: Alfred Perlstein Cc: Peter Brezny , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: /etc/passwd Message-ID: <19990506090001.K40359@freebie.lemis.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.4i In-Reply-To: ; from Alfred Perlstein on Wed, May 05, 1999 at 02:24:54PM -0500 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-41-739-7062 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wednesday, 5 May 1999 at 14:24:54 -0500, Alfred Perlstein wrote: > 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. You can also write # EDITOR=emacs 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). Right. That's why I used a different editor in my example :-) I think the real point that everybody has missed here is that vipw doesn't edit /etc/passwd, it edits /etc/master.passwd and then runs a database build program which actually does the update. /etc/passwd is only for old-style programs which read information from it; that's why editing it doesn't have any effect. Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message