Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 10:32:28 +1000 From: Greg Black <gjb@comkey.com.au> To: Mark Ovens <marko@uk.radan.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Can't change shell - Please help newbie Message-ID: <19990222003229.10755.qmail@alpha.comkey.com.au> In-Reply-To: <19990221083902.A258@localhost> of Sun, 21 Feb 1999 08:39:02 GMT References: <913B8C252194D2119BD500805F318178030416@za12nt02.mweb.com> <19990220124307.E185@localhost> <19990221005745.7091.qmail@alpha.comkey.com.au> <19990221083902.A258@localhost>
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Here's a tip for people who allow an initial flush of anger or dismay at some public article to provoke them into retaliatory mode: don't do it. It's just too easy to make a fool of yourself and it's even worse if you do it in public. If you really must lash out at some mongrel who has offended you, at least do it in private email -- that way, you get to avoid making an ass of yourself in public; you avoid the risk of annoying other people who might then start ignoring your other posts; and you might even get the problem sorted out with the other person. And here's a request for *anybody* who wants to flame me, either about this article or about anything else I have written (or even about my hair colour, religious affiliations, or gender): please leave the list for its purpose and flame me as much as you like in private email. Mark Ovens writes: > Why have I been singled out for a lecture here Greg? You haven't > Cc:'d the 2 other respondents. Your comments could equally well > apply to them also. Mark either has a severely broken mailer or sadly deficient vision -- all the recipients of his original article (two individuals and this list) were Cc'd in the message that he is complaining about -- I know this for certain because I just checked the copy that was delivered to me by the list. As for why my message was addressed to Mark, that was because I was responding to something he wrote with a bit of extra information. It's generally considered the normal way to do these things. > > First, please trim the irrelevant elements of posts that you > > respond to (see the regular article about how to get the best > > from the list if this is a puzzle). > > I have read the regular article, and no, it isn't a puzzle. > > I take it that by "irrelevant elements" you mean the original > poster's .sig, since Charon back-quoted the entire message, except > for the .sig, as well. Bear in mind that, because my message was directed to the list, its intended audience was the list at large. If it was just something for Mark, I'd have written privately to him. The fact remains that, out of 37 lines in the body of his message, four were a relevant quotation and attribution; four were Mark's perfectly reasonable response and a useful line of white space; three lines were an irrelevant bit of quoted material (because there was no comment on it); twelve lines were a completely useless quote of the ridiculous signature from the original message; four lines were the unsubscribe instructions (which also appear at the end, of course); and nine lines were Mark's own excessively long signature. It's not hard to guess what parts I think should have been trimmed. > > > How are you editing the password file? If you are just editing > > > /etc/passwd it won't work. Use vipw(8). When you save and exit vipw > > > re-builds the passwd database. > > > > It might be useful to explain why editing /etc/passwd is no use, > > since that has been for many years (and still is, in many cases) > > the canonical way to do these things. > > My reply was pretty much the same as Jim Mock's yet I don't see > Jim's name in the To: or Cc: fields of your e-mail. Jim's article had not arrived here when I replied to Mark's and in any case, if anything I said was relevant to him, he had the opportunity to read my response on the list. He was not one of the parties to the particular message that I was responding to. > It didn't seem necessary to go into detail of how the password file > mechanism works. The original poster only wanted to know how to > change his default shell and mentioned that he had tried editing > /etc/passwd and it didn't work. This is the really silly part of the article. All I did was provide some additional background information for the benefit of both the original poster and for current readers of the list and future readers who might peruse the archives. There was nothing wrong with what Mark first wrote; I just added to it. This is hardly something to get upset about. We all find there are times when somebody else can add something useful to what we have said. But a response like this only serves to make the real point of the exercise (which is to help people better understand and use FreeBSD) disappear under somebody's wounded pride. > > FreeBSD (like many other modern systems) provides both "shadow" > > passwords and a variety of extra fields that are not part of the > > traditional /etc/passwd file. All this magic is contained in > > the new passwd file (/etc/master.passwd) and this is the file > > that must be edited (using vipw) for changes to take effect. > > > > After the editing is done, vipw does what is needed to update > > both /etc/passwd and the hashed database files -- which are the > > files that are really accessed by all the lookup routines. > > > > RTFM for a fuller description, starting with passwd(5). > > I have RTFM, quite recently as well. Due to a utility truncating > /etc/passwd, /etc/master.passwd and /etc/groups to zero bytes I > had to figure out how to repair the damage. Everybody on the list is well aware of the problems Mark had in this regard. But the RTFM comment was not directed to Mark, and was not one of those RTFM remarks that are a substitute for providing any useful information. It was a helpful pointer, for the benefit of the original poster and anybody else who wanted more information, to the actual source of further reading on the topic in the event that my couple of paragraphs above might have whetted their appetite for further study of this topic. I apologize to any readers who wish this little controversy had not erupted and assure you that I really mean it when I ask people to address any further flames direct to me in private rather than to the list. -- Greg Black <gjb@acm.org> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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