From owner-freebsd-questions  Thu Aug  7 12:08:59 1997
Return-Path: <owner-freebsd-questions>
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id MAA24747
          for questions-outgoing; Thu, 7 Aug 1997 12:08:59 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from gdi.uoregon.edu (cisco-ts16-line10.uoregon.edu [128.223.150.210])
          by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA24742
          for <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>; Thu, 7 Aug 1997 12:08:54 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from localhost (dwhite@localhost)
          by gdi.uoregon.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id MAA00500;
          Thu, 7 Aug 1997 12:08:47 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Thu, 7 Aug 1997 12:08:47 -0700 (PDT)
From: Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu>
X-Sender: dwhite@localhost
Reply-To: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu>
To: A Ling <al52x@nih.gov>
cc: "freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject: Re: Problem with chsh/vipw
In-Reply-To: <199708071506.LAA16012@pop.cc.nih.gov>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970807120608.252f-100000@localhost>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

On Thu, 7 Aug 1997, A Ling wrote:

>    Prior to recent messages here regarding chsh & vipw, I 
> edited /etc/passwd & /etc/master.passwd (using ee) to alter 
> my default shell.  

>    When I use either chsh or vipw, they 
> both initially show the default shell of users aling or mmc to be 
> /bin/sh, despite contents of master.passwd & passwd as below.  

Yes, it is showing you what is in the real password database.  See
pwd_mkdb(8).

> Clearly, this state information is stored somewhere else, and
> accounts for why my earlier edits failed.  After editing to either 
> /bin/csh or /usr/local/bin/tcsh, both chsh & vipw show errors 
> in pwd_mkdb such as follows:
> 
> "/etc/pw.000237" 14 lines, 303 characters
> chsh: WARNING: shell '/bin/tcsh' does not exist
> chsh: rebuilding the database...
> pwd_mkdb: corrupted entry
> pwd_mkdb: at line #13
> pwd_mkdb: /etc/pw.000237: Inappropriate file type or format
> chsh: /etc/master.passwd: unchanged
> 
> and similarly for passwd.  I'm confused because I'm sure I 
> didnt have '/bin/tcsh' by the time I left the editor, saving 
> the changes.  Need I return /etc/passwd & /etc/master.passwd 
> to their initial state before using chsh/vipw?  I guess I 
> could extract the initial state of any other pertinent files in 
> /etc from the bin.* part of the distribution, but was hoping 
> someone here might recognize how to help me avoid that.  
> I'm running 2.2.2-R.

Since you broke master.passwd, you need to fix it and run pwd_mkdb against
it to compile it in.

And in the future use vipw.

Doug White                              | University of Oregon  
Internet:  dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu    | Residence Networking Assistant
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite    | Computer Science Major
Spam routed to /dev/null by Procmail    | Death to Cyberpromo