In my original posting, I expressed some corruption troubles in my system's
passwd file, and although the system was still running, it was impossible to
find any valid information in the plain text passwd file.
Since time had passed after the corruption appeared, there was no valid backup
of that passwd file and older backups were not up to date, so my best option was
to attempt to recreate the passwd file from the hash database with something
that would reverse the process of mkpasswd.
Several unix gurus have presented a few examples that would do this or part of
it, and a c program sent by Alan Rollow did the trick, after a small amount of
hand work, the passwd file was recreated and everything is working as it should
so far.
Thanks to all who responded and sent the utilities to get the job done.
Didier Godefroy
Received on Fri May 21 1999 - 16:30:22 NZST