Re: Ways to manage passwd/shadow files?

[Brendan Strejcek]

Spam Collector wrote:

> What's the best way to use cfengine to manage /etc/passwd and
> /etc/shadow? Managing the entire file as a copy would be easy enough,
> but how can you just manage a chunk of it? Using edifiles to control a
> block would have the desired result, except that AFAIK you can't have
> comment lines in those files (the ### BEGIN and ### END lines I use to
> manage blocks in other config files).

As there is no order to a passwd file, why do you need to manage it in
blocks at all?

A trick that I am fond of is embedding vipw in shellcommands with ed as
EDITOR, but that would not scale to large collections of users.

-- Brendan