password
I am writing a script to add a large amount of users to a system. Part of this involves setting default passwords for each user. How can I set users' passwords without it prompting me for the password up front?
Unfortunately passwd doesn't seem to take an argument stating the new password to set. I'm using Ubuntu 11.10.
It's improper to say that: "It seems that on Ubuntu, calls to sudo from the GUI are somehow being intercepted by pkexec". pkexec doesn't have much in common with sudo. In contrast with sudo, pkexec does not grant root permission to an entire process, but rather allows a finer level of control of centralized system policy.
Now, if you want to run a GUI application without being asked by a password by pkexec, this is not difficult to be done. Let's take for example GParted. When you open it, you will see the following dialog window asking you by a password:
Click Details and the dialog window will look now like:
From here all you have to do is to open /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/com.ubuntu.pkexec.gparted.policy file using for example the following command:
gksu gedit /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/com.ubuntu.pkexec.gparted.policy
and change the following lines:
<allow_any>auth_admin</allow_any>
<allow_inactive>auth_admin</allow_inactive>
<allow_active>auth_admin</allow_active>with the followings:
<allow_any>yes</allow_any>
<allow_inactive>yes</allow_inactive>
<allow_active>yes</allow_active>Save the file and close it. Next, when you will open GParted you will not be asked for a password anymore.
According to this answer you can use secret-tool:
# store password
secret-tool store --label='MyLabel' server myserver user myuser key password
# retrieve password
secret-tool lookup server myserver user myuser key password
Best Answer
Try usermod:
The only thing is this needs a pre-encrypted password string which you'd have to generate first.
In order to generate the encrypted password you can use
openssl. For example: