Change user password with one Bash command line

Question

I am making a program with Python 2.7, I use shell commands to create new users on Ubuntu and I want to setup the password for the new user. I use command prompt (Bash) commands to create users. Is there a command line that would change user's password just with 1 shell command? I tried:

echo "newpass" | passwd --stdin user1 

but it appears the current Ubuntu 16.04 version I have doesn't have the --stdin parameter anymore. And I need that after the command is executed, the password would be set, I would not need to retype to confirm password etc (like using terminal).

Fluent

This sounds dangerous. – Wellspring

@AryaMcCarthy On what basis? :) – Bashful

Answer 1

echo 'user:passwd' | sudo chpasswd

This helped me.

Fluent

Well, that is basically what I suggested? And it should be vice versa, i.e.: echo 'user:passwd' | sudo chpasswd – Syconium

I'll suggest changing the correct answer to @AndriyBerestovskyy 's one as he replied first and this is just a sample of his answer. In the best case, you could remove your answer and add it as an edit on his answer. – Ransom

This is a (poor) copy of the earlier answer by @AndriyBerestovskyy! – Emotive

Answer 2

Please see the man chpasswd(8): man 8 chpasswd

The chpasswd command reads a list of user name and password pairs from
standard input and uses this information to update a group of existing
users. Each line is of the format:

user_name:password

Based on the man you can use: echo 'user:passwd' | sudo chpasswd

Syconium

Thanks for digging out the MAN page. I never knew this was possible. – Om

Answer 3

Kindly try below one one-liner command for user & password creation

useradd himanshi ; echo -e "1234\n1234" | passwd himanshi

Monocyclic

above trick is also useful when need to create user with password in Ansible. command module will work here. – Monocyclic

Can you explain why does this work? Does passwd only read one line at a time and keeps a record where it left off? – Azeria

Hi @dtc348. no. but yes you can create in bat in different way as shown below :: Create user net user himanshi 1234 /add :: Set password echo 1234| net user himanshi * – Monocyclic

Answer 4

sudo echo -e "<yourpassword>\n<yourpassword>" | sudo passwd <user>

This helped me.

Burgoo