Using the passwd command from within a shell script

Question

I\'m writing a shell script to automatically add a new user and update their password. I don\'t know how to get passwd to read from the shell script instead of interactively

Answer 1

You can use the expect utility to drive all programs that read from a tty (as opposed to stdin, which is what passwd does). Expect comes with ready to run examples for all sorts of interactive problems, like passwd entry.