What's changed? The addition of and defaulting to ActiveState Perl. My assertion that the problem also occurred under {the Redhat-supplied} 5.6.0 was mistaken, due to some $PATH mangling and the wrong symbolic link being referenced. It's the ActivePerl {5.6.1, build 633} that's the problem. This behavior is quite disturbing, too. If their crypt function were used by the unwary to create a password file (which I nearly did), any password subsequently entered during authentication would match -- a clear security breach! And the programmer wouldn't have a clue that anything was amiss without looking at the encrypted password file.

Before posting this, I called ActiveState to give them a chance to comment. I was informed that this was a known bug, discovered only in the past couple days.

Update (18 Sep 02): Added braced text for clarification. I haven't used ActiveState's 5.6.0 or other builds of 5.6.1, so I don't know if they had the same problem.

In reply to Re: Re: Weird crypt Behavior by Dr. Mu
in thread Weird crypt Behavior by Dr. Mu

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