Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 00:04:56 -0700 From: Chris Fedde <chris@fedde.littleton.co.us> To: bastill@sa.apana.org.au Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: A question from a convert from Windows to FreeBSD Message-ID: <200201260704.g0Q74u864537@fedde.littleton.co.us> In-Reply-To: <02012614002402.01182@BAPhD.gihon.org.au>
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On Sat, 26 Jan 2002 14:00:24 +1030 Brian Astill wrote:
+------------------
| On Friday 25 January 2002 13:15, Bill Moran wrote:
|
| > From your reaction, I'm guessing you have yet to discover the
| > built-in man pages
|
| I had a recent problem of somehow not being able to enter my system as
| user. I needed to change the me-as-user password and thought I would
| need to know the password FreeBSD was already holding in order to do
| this. I searched the man pages for passwd ypasswd etc etc, but NOWHERE
| could I find anything that told me how to make the change without
| knowing the existing password.
| When I asked on this list, the answer was somewhat embarrassing <blush>.
|
| However, what I am saying is that the simple sentence "passwords can be
| changed by root without knowledge of a users existing password" was
| simply not there on any man page - heaps and heaps of well-written
| detail I did not need, was.
+------------------
But the manual page says this in the the first paragraph...
Passwd changes the user's local, Kerberos, or NIS password.
If the user is not the super-user, passwd first prompts for
the current password and will not continue unless the correct
password is entered.
The second sentence seems to be just another way of saying exactly
what you say was missing from the page. Maybe I've been reading
these things for too long, but it seems clear to me. Negative logic
can be confusing. And maybe this needs some cleaning up. You might
want to submit a patch to the FreeBSD Documentation project.
--
Chris Fedde
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