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

Here-document works if your passwd doesn't support --stdin and you don't want to (or can't) use chpasswd for some reason.

Example:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

username="user"
password="pass"

passwd ${username} << EOD
${password}
${password}
EOD

Tested under Arch Linux. This passwd is an element of shadow-utils and installed from the core/filesystem package, which you usually have by default since the package is required by core/base.