erm... mod_auth , don't recall mentioning it.

Second, why write a daemon if you already have them: ftp, telnet, rlogin, etc... .
What can I say but ,why write a cgi with authentication when there are daemons that support auth to /etc/shadow like rlogin... oh that's right this is a web application. My gist was that whilst your cgi gets called on demand by apache, you can have an entirely different and non-cgi accessible script that runs as root , hence has carte-blanche over things like getpwbyname that are simply unavailable to for instance - the apache user.

I do not for a minute suggest that you don't know what you are doing. I am pleased your code is quite secure and well tainted.

Is there less harm in finding out passwords of Mysql, htpasswd etc, than there is of system accounts?

Obviously none are desirable, but owning a system account gives rise to far more possibilities for harming that particular system IMHO.

I can't believe it's not psellchecked