Question

I’m trying to write a C program to change a user password using Linux system calls. I have tryed to use the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files but I’m having problems because the password is encrypted, can you help me to solve this?

void main (int argc, char **argv) {

uid_t uid;

struct passwd *pw;

uid = getuid();

if (argc > 1)
    pw = getpwnam(argv[1]);
else
    pw = getpwuid(uid);
//system("passwd");
//printf("%i",execl("/usr/bin/passwd","passwd",pw->pw_name)); //here I tried to use execl but it returns error

}

I used system(“passwd”) but I don’t think my teacher will accept that. On the rest of it I was just trying to understand the getpw… stuff, it’s not important.

Answer 1

You can try to use putpwent for this. As Jonathan Leffler said in the comments, you need putspent if you want to update the shadow file.

But the easiest and probably the most portable way to do this would be to just call passwd via system(3) or popen(3).