Hello my friends,

I am setting up an old 486 machine (on a 'sandboxed' part of my home network) with a Slack install, to allow so of my friends to start working with linux at the shell. I am writing a Perl program to allow for 'anonymous' user creation; this program runs as the 'shell' of a special newuser account whose password I will hand out to folks I know who want to make a shell account.

Now here's the rub. I'm new to Perl, and am trying to implement lots of different little things in it to practice. I have been running into real difficulty in implementing the "useradd" and "passwd" programs from within the Perl program, once I have taken in and validated such things as what user name the person wants, etc.

How do you think I should be go about doing this securely? Right now I have: 
system '/usr/sbin/useradd', "-u $uid", '-g 100', '-m', $username;
exec '/usr/bin/passwd', $username;

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which is just simply not working. Do I fork a process to do this. I haven't even gotten to working on the "passwd" part (which I know will cause lots of trouble) as the "useradd" part is still on the fink.

Thanks so much, you guys are brilliant.

In reply to Public Access Linux Box by lacertus

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