They're most likely calling something else (via system or some variant of qx//) which expects to be run from a tty. Given the particular error message passwd would be my guess presuming some flavour of Linux.

And given that they don't know enough about *NIX to know that passwd is going to try to read from its TTY rather than stdin they probably don't want to be writing a web sysadmin interface . . .

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In reply to Re^2: Error: Inappropriate ioctl for device by Fletch
in thread Error: Inappropriate ioctl for device by trickyzxr

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