passwd command

I'm wondering if anyone has come across a 'permission denied' error when attempting to use the passwd command. I do a 'passwd <username>' and then it asks me to put the password in and then confirm it as is usual, but after I enter it the second time I get this permission denied error. I am assuming it is trying to write to the /etc/shadow file but I fail to see how it wouldn't have permission to do so. Also, this is for a new user I created, but I even tried it for my root account and I still got the error. This is on Solaris 10 by the way. Any help would be appreciated.

hmm password control procedures are a bit more strict in solaris, if you check passwd's man page (man 1 passwd), it mentions some requirements for a change to take place. Perhaps that's the problem.

Thanks for the advice. I forgot to install the man pages with Solaris so I finally found the manual on the sun.com page and it turned out I had to edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf file and alter the "passwd: files nis" line to: "passwd: files" and that did the trick. That's twice now I've had to alter this file. Originally I couldn't resolve domain names until I made a change to this file as well. I'm too used to Linux :roll: