Hello Beaker,

I was reading the documentation of crypt and I noticed from the sample code:

if (crypt($word, $pwd) ne $pwd) {
    die "Sorry...\n";
} else {
    print "ok\n";
}
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They are using first the word and then the password. It is not related to your problem but I think it would be more clear in future reference:

my $cryptedpass = crypt($passwrd1, substr($never_blank_value, 0, 2));
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The only reason that I can imagine that you might have $cryptedpass as blank is that you have $never_blank_value. You are using substr and you are cutting off the first 2 characters of the string. In case the string it has less than 2 characters then you will end up with undef value. Sample of proposed code:

Sample of error:

Update: Based on the link 0007695: Crypt bug that fellow Monk poj point it out you might be passing non acceptable characters. If this is the case add this to your code:

Hope this helps, BR.

Thank you, I believe this is the issue.

My debug for an instance of this undef value has $never_blank_value as T_ (after substr)

$never_blank_value contains a–zA–Z0–9\-_ so it's likely this would break if it contains the hyphen or underscore, I will run a regex over $never_blank_value to filter out these disallowed characters.

You could save some fiddly typing by using ASCII values with chr in a map to generate your character ranges. I would generate the "salt" for crypt on the fly from the documented allowed characters rather than your mysterious $never_blank_value.

johngg@shiraz ~/perl/Monks $ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E '
my @saltChars = map chr, 46 .. 57, 65 .. 90, 97 .. 122;
my @passChars = map chr, 50 .. 57, 97 .. 107, 109, 110, 112 .. 122;
my $salt      = join q{}, map $saltChars[ rand @saltChars ], 1 .. 2;
my $password  = join q{}, map $passChars[ rand @passChars ], 1 .. 8;
my $crypted   = crypt $password, $salt;
say qq{Salt       : $salt};
say qq{Password   : $password};
say qq{crypt()ed  : $crypted};'
Salt       : pI
Password   : x3ds5fey
crypt()ed  : pIS1tIDqATjmQ
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Running this a few times produces

Salt       : mQ
Password   : jxaijfqu
crypt()ed  : mQf.VRB0dpcbk
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Salt       : /5
Password   : h7si8gh9
crypt()ed  : /5.1Gj12mBfQY
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Salt       : Tp
Password   : yjqyaikk
crypt()ed  : Tp/YoIkhaUEOE
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I hope this is helpful.

Update: Fixed missing </code> tag.

A previous post of yours mentioned Centos 7

This post suggests that allowable salt characters may have changed

Thank you.

my $cryptedpass = crypt($passwrd1, $never_blank_value));

Is that a paste from your code? It appears to have unbalanced brackets. Perhaps that's part of the problem?

Alternatively, if you add a diagnostic on such intermittent occurences you might spot a connection. eg:

die "Empty result from crypt($passwrd1, $never_blank_value)" unless de
+fined $cryptedpass;
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I've fixed this, sorry it was when I replaced the variable name with $never_blank_value for purposes of copying it here.