How can I set a users password in linux from a python script?

Question

I\'m trying to automate the setup of SFTP access. This script is running as a user with sudo permissions and no password.

I can create a user like so:

Answer 1

The documentation for communicate says that you'll need to add stdin=PIPE if you're sending data to standard input via the communicate parameter:

http://docs.python.org/release/2.6/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.Popen.communicate

I appreciate this is just skeleton code, but here are another couple of other small comments, in case they are of use:

• If you're not interested in the output of the useradd command other than whether it failed or not, you might be better off using subprocess.check_call which will raise an exception if the command returns non-zero.
• In the second case, you should check whether process.returncode is 0 after your call to communicate('test:password')