vipw - mangled temp file message

[Lisa Mauer]

On one of our servers any time you run "vipw" and make changes you receive the following message:

"/etc/ptmp" 211 lines, 15422 characters
vipw: you mangled the temp file, /etc/passwd unchanged

B.10.20 U 9000/861
Any ideas? Happens whether you just change a comment or lock an account, anything.... I can't seem to find the error anywhere in any docs...

[James Beamish-White]

Have you checked to see the file does not exist before you run vipw? And the the root (/etc) filesystem is not full?

Cheers,
James

[Cheryl Griffin · Accepted solution]

What is your shell? Root shell should be /sbin/sh.

Cheryl

[James Beamish-White]

Should've done some research first before giving a dumb answer - sorry about that. Check out

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=1B&topic=vipw


Cheers,
james

[Lisa Mauer]

Cheryl - you are a genius!!! It was ksh on that server - I would have never thought of looking at that!
Thanks much!

[S.K. Chan]

What does root's passowrd entry looked like ? Vipw is quite fussy when it comes to root's login shell. For example if you got /bin/ksh as your root's login shell you would get this error. Root's shell is usually /sbin/sh.

[V. V. Ravi Kumar_1]

hi,

have u rebooted the machine without removing /etc/ptmp file. tha man page says the follwoing.

an /etc/passwd.tmp file not removed when a system crashes prevents further editing of the /etc/passwd file using vipw after the system is rebooted.

regds

[Hai Nguyen_1]

Lisa,

Can you give us an example of your update (changing a comment...)?

Hai

[Cheryl Griffin]

Great!
Glad to have helped.
Cheryl

[Lisa Mauer]

Thanks everyone - James - no big deal - Thanks anyway :)

Everyone gets points today :)