This repository is currently read-only because the code has been vendored into https://github.com/xapi-project/xen-api and is not maintained independently.
This is a simple C library with OCaml bindings to support updating Unix account passwords in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. It is not meant to support other operations, like creating or deleting accounts. For this you might be interested in opasswd which exposed the complete C API for password handling to OCaml.
Be aware that updating password entries requires root privileges. So update functions will fail unless called with root privileges.
The OCaml code lives in directory src/ and provides simple bindings
for the underlying C functions.
The C code lives in directory c/ and contains a Makefile that is not
used by the build process for OCaml bindings but was used during
development of the C code.
The Makefile in directory c/ builds a small binary for tests. This is
especially useful for debugging purposes with GDB.
$ cd c
$ make
$ ./unixpwd root
root: x
/etc/passwd: root: x
can't find shadow entry for root: Permission denied
$ ./unixpwd | head
root:x:0:0:root:/root
daemon:x:1:1:daemon:/usr/sbin
bin:x:2:2:bin:/bin
sys:x:3:3:sys:/dev
sync:x:4:65534:sync:/bin
games:x:5:60:games:/usr/games
man:x:6:12:man:/var/cache/man
lp:x:7:7:lp:/var/spool/lpd
mail:x:8:8:mail:/var/mail
news:x:9:9:news:/var/spool/newsDirectory test/ contains a small OCaml program that reads and
updates password entries. Since it needs to be run as root and uses the
system's password database, it is not run automatically. It is
configures to update the account unixpwd that you might want to create
for this purpose.
The Makefile in the c/ directory contains support for running
valgrind to find memory leaks. Valgrind reports some reachable memory
at exit. As far as I can tell, this is related to memory allocated by
libc for /etc/nsswitch.