Note for Windows folks: getting crypt to supply MD5 encryption as described by tadman is not supported in ActiveState Perl.

   print "Long:  ", crypt('shjdajksds', '$1$abcdefgh'), "\n";
   print "Short: ", crypt('shjdajksds', '$1'         ), "\n";
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Using ActiveState build 623 this produces:

   Long:  $1G0qFXI2hLqU
   Short: $1G0qFXI2hLqU
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But on Linux we get:

   Long:  $1$abcdefgh$LBpJSL4DEIVrkp1RZO36I0
   Short: $1KHjUeDByb1c
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As is often the case YMMV. (Can we assume that Linux Perl is calling a system function which supports the MD5 option?) The standard Perl doc page for crypt doesn't mention this behavior. Nor does   'man crypt'   on my Linux system.

Where is it documented?

And I don't even want to talk about why the short versions are different on the two systems. Yuck! (I ran this several times to be sure.) Are 'standard' passwords not sharable across platforms?