It depends what you want to do.

Do you want to:

1. Be able to get the exact text back later? e.g. to pass to a different program to authenticate the user.
2. Be able to simply check that the password given matches the one previously given

The two cases are different since in the first you have to have a reversible way of getting it out which is pretty much going to be unsafe no matter what. If you can do the second case you can use the crypt function to munge the password, store the munged version and then later munge the new password given and compare the two munged versions. That way you never need to store the cleartext version.

If that doesn't help, tell us what you are really trying to do and we will help.

-ben