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Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:41:53 +0100
From: Ruben de Groot <mail25@bzerk.org>
To: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk>
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	Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk>,
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Cc: George Sanders <gosand1982@yahoo.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: How can I rescue my passwd file after corrupting it (and why
	does	it still work) ?
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On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 08:14:00AM +0000, Matthew Seaman typed:
> 
> % pw user show -n matthew
> matthew:*:1001:1001::0:0:Matthew Seaman:/home/matthew:/bin/tcsh
> 
> prints out the master.passwd entry for the user account but *without* the
> password crypt-text.  You can use:
> 
>  % pw user show -a 
> 
> to get a list of all users.  This should use spwd.db rather than the 
> original
> flat files -- it will enumerate all users from LDAP or NIS if your machine 
> is
> configured to use those.  Unfortunately, you will have to merge in the 
> crypted
> password strings by hand or else get all your users to set new passwords.

Another way to recover is using perl:

while ( ($name,$passwd,$uid,$gid,$quota,$comment,$gcos,$dir,$shell,$expire) = getpwent ) {
        print $name . ":" . $passwd . ":" . $uid . ":" . $gid . "::0:" . $expire . ":" . $gcos . ":" .$dir . ":" . $shell . "\n";
}

This will generate a file you can use to replace master.passwd, without
login class or passwd last changed information (if you use that) but
including the encrypted password.

Ruben