Question

I’m creating a system that allow me to create users automatically after an inscription. In this way, i’ve made a Perl script that generate a random password, crypt it with “mkpasswd” and then create an user with “useradd”, after that user-infos are sended to a database.

I’ve search documentation, and i’ve try to use the php exec function to call the Perl program.

$command = "/server/backoffice/scripts/usercreation.pl $username";
exec($command, $result);
print_r($result);

The usercreation.pl script work fine in a terminal, but for a unknown reason, it just not work from php, nothing happen, i know that the problem come from the useradd syntax or if not it come from the useradd command. The error value returned is 255 <=> 0xff <=> -1 .

I think the problem come from the –password option of useradd, in fact, this option use mkpasswd and maybe it could disturb the shell or something else like that :p

The complete useradd command used by the Perl program:

system("/usr/sbin/useradd $username -m -d $home --expiredate $expire --shell $shell --gid $gid --password $c_password");

EDIT:
The usercreation.pl file on pastebin (has been truncated to the part we are investigate):
http://pastebin.com/DgFdndXf

The php one :
http://pastebin.com/pQhADNzg

The web server used is nginx/0.7.65.

The version of php used is PHP 5.3.3-1.

uname -a

Linux openco 2.6.35-32-generic #67-Ubuntu SMP Mon Mar 5 19:35:26 UTC 2012 i686 GNU/Linux

Thanks for all!

Answer 1

The useradd must be run as root, so you will need sudo to specify that nginx can run your script as root.

Be extremely careful with this stuff; make sure you sanitize user names and escape your command properly as well using escapeshellarg().