Changing an AIX password via script?

Question

I am trying to change a password of a user via script. I cannot use sudo as there is a feature that requires the user to change the password again if another user changes their password.

AIX is running on the system.

unfortunately, chpasswd is unavailable.

I have expected installed, but I am having trouble with that also.

here is what I thought would work

echo "oldpassword\nnewpasswd123\nnewpasswd123" | passwd user

However once run the script I am prompted with please enter user's old password shouldn't they all be echoed in?

I am a beginner with shell scripting and this has been baffled.

Answer 1

You can try:

echo "USERNAME:NEWPASSWORD" | chpasswd

Answer 2

Use GNU passwd stdin flag.

From the man page:

   --stdin
          This option is used to indicate that passwd should read the new password from standard input, which can be a pipe.

NOTE: Only for root user.

Example

$ adduser foo 
$ echo "NewPass" |passwd foo --stdin
Changing password for user foo.
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

Alternatively you can use expect, this simple code will do the trick:

#!/usr/bin/expect
spawn passwd foo
expect "password:"
send "Xcv15kl\r"
expect "Retype new password:"
send "Xcv15kl\r"
interact

Results

$ ./passwd.xp 
spawn passwd foo
Changing password for user foo.
New password: 
Retype new password: 
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

Answer 3

In addition to the other suggestions, you can also achieve this using a HEREDOC.

In your immediate case, this might look like:

$ /usr/bin/passwd root <<EOF
test
test
EOF

Answer 4

You need echo -e for the newline characters to take affect

you wrote

echo "oldpassword\nnewpasswd123\nnewpasswd123" | passwd user

you should try

echo -e "oldpassword\nnewpasswd123\nnewpasswd123" | passwd user

more than likely, you will not need the oldpassword\n portion of that command, you should just need the two new passwords. Don't forget to use single quotes around exclamation points!

echo -e "new"'!'"passwd123\nnew"'!'"passwd123" | passwd user