Changing password via a script

June 2014
To change a password in Linux through a Bash script, he two scripts that are most important are
'Create Users' and 'Change Passwords Shell' scripts, for the system admin which regularly uses
the mail servers, as there might be multiple functionalities associated with the admin job. If there
is a failure to backup the admin's system username and password, it hampers other admin tasks
and chances of password misappropriation are high. If you lose the usernames and passwords of
the mail server, the admin has to manually create all the users again and then change the
passwords for all of them. There are two methods to change passwords on the system if you are
using the Linux operating system .The conventional command is passwd, -stdin, pipe. One
more option that can be used is the chpasswd.

Changing password via a script

Method 1: passwd
Method 2: chpasswd

Method 1: passwd
Conventionally, the command use to change a password on a Linux based system is passwd.
The option related to this command is -stdin , and this is all done through a pipe
echo -e "new_password\nnew_password" | (passwd --stdin $USER)

Method 2: chpasswd
An alternative is to use chpasswd, as below:
echo "password:name" | chpasswd
Note that the first method can be use to change the password on Samba based system:
echo -e "new_password\nnew_password" | (smbpasswd -a -s $USER)
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