Piping password to smbpasswd

Question

How can I pipe the new password to smbpasswd so I can automate my installation process.

Answer 1

This unfortunately is not desirable for two reasons: 1) if the user uses a combination of '\n' in the password there will be a mismatch in the input 2) if there are unix users on the system, then a user using the utility ps may see the password

A better way would be to put the names in a file and read from the file and use python pexpect to read them, not like below, but the simple script is enough to see how to use pexpect

#!/usr/bin/python
#converted from: http://pexpect.sourceforge.net/pexpect.html
#child = pexpect.spawn('scp foo myname@host.example.com:.')
#child.expect ('Password:')
#child.sendline (mypassword)
import pexpect
import sys
user=sys.argv[1]
passwd=sys.argv[2]
child = pexpect.spawn('/usr/bin/smbpasswd -a '+str(user))
child.expect('New SMB password:')
child.sendline (passwd)
child.expect ('Retype new SMB password:')
child.sendline (passwd)

then try: ./smbpasswd.py userName1 'f#@(&*(_\n895'