Using the passwd command from within a shell script

Question

I\'m writing a shell script to automatically add a new user and update their password. I don\'t know how to get passwd to read from the shell script instead of interactively

Answer 1

Sometimes it is useful to set a password which nobody knows. This seems to work:

tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 < /dev/urandom | head -c44 | passwd --stdin $user