in reply to Public Access Linux Box

Managed to solve the problem with much hair-pulling. For some reason (perhaps platform dependant), perl (or probably more correctly passwd itself) refuses to accept a change of password when run
system "/usr/bin/passwd", $username;

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I am happy enough leaving this fact alone, and have rather manually taken in the passwd and encrypted it with crypt. This is probably superfluous, but I may as well show you what I did in case someone has this problem in the future. 
print "Password: ";
chomp(my $passwd = <STDIN>);
$passwd = crypt($passwd, time());
$uid=($max+1);

system '/usr/sbin/useradd', "-u $uid", '-s', $shell,
        '-p', $passwd, '-g 100', '-m', $username;

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So simple in hindsight. Perl really humbles me!

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Re^2: Public Access Linux Box
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Mar 15, 2003 at 12:52 UTC
    Or maybe in more Perlish lingo: 
    print "Password: ";
chomp(my $passwd = <STDIN>);

system(
    '/usr/sbin/useradd',
    -u => $max + 1,
    -s => $shell,
    -p => crypt($passwd, time),
    -g => 100,
    '-m',
    $username,
);

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    :-) Btw, I recommend removing the setuid bit from useradd ASAP. Otherwise, anyone can do something like 
    $ /usr/sbin/useradd -u 0 -g 0 -s /bin/bash -p crypted_passwd_here -m root2
    which is a classic escalation of privileges attack. Instead, you want to look into sudo. Your /etc/sudoers should have a line like this: 
    newuser ALL = (root) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/useradd
    and then your code changes to 
    system(
    '/usr/bin/sudo',
    '/usr/sbin/useradd',
    -u => $max + 1,
    -s => $shell,
    -p => crypt($passwd, time),
    -g => 100,
    '-m',
    $username,
);

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    That way only newuser, whom only root has control of, may add new users.

    Makeshifts last the longest.

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