The passwd utility has a bit of undesired behaviour on my Suse system. Most of my users don't have entries in shadow, they depend on pam_krb5 for authentication. So /etc/shadow is very short, it only has lines for root and a few systems users who need to get in even if the network is down. I want for everyone else to be denied even the possibility of a password. Now in the past (under solaris) passwd would grumble and fail unless that username had a line present in shadow. THIS passwd just bungs the encrypted string into /etc/passwd! Argh! How can I suppress this obnoxious obsequiousness on the part of passwd? TIA, michaelj -- Michael James michael.james@csiro.au System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040 CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166