Date: Thu, 6 May 1999 09:00:02 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Alfred Perlstein <bright@rush.net> Cc: Peter Brezny <peter@shorthair.purplecat.net>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: /etc/passwd Message-ID: <19990506090001.K40359@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.990505142312.7628F-100000@cygnus.rush.net>; from Alfred Perlstein on Wed, May 05, 1999 at 02:24:54PM -0500 References: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9905051413250.15334-100000@shorthair.purplecat.net> <Pine.BSF.3.96.990505142312.7628F-100000@cygnus.rush.net>
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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
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