Because passwd is actually a big old command that uses
lots of shared libraries. - and may use other network
calls, such as yp or kerberos. commands in /bin are staticly
linked.
The short answer is if you want to do things like
vi or passwd in single user mode - mount /usr - it's not that
hard.
having said that I never run passwd to recover a root
password, I just use ed on /etc/master.passwd, paste in a copy
of a blowfish password I know and run pwd_mkdb
-Bob
* Joco Salvatti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2006-04-12 08:37]:
> Hi all,
>
> I'd like to know why 'passwd' is located in /usr/bin, since this
> command is very important for system maintenance purposes. Wouldn't it
> be better 'passwd' being located in /bin? Because generally /usr has
> its own partition, and then, when entering in single user mode for any
> reason or even to recover root password we are to mount /usr partition
> in order to run 'passwd'. I'm asking it because I've faced this
> problem sometime ago. An OpenBSD server was installed by a sysadmin
> that travelled as he had quit the job. Then when I assumed this
> responsability (being a sysadmin) no one could tell me the superuser
> password, because no one knew that information, thus I had to enter in
> single user mode, but in order to run 'passwd' I had to mount /usr.
>
> Thanks
>
> --
> Joco Salvatti
> Undergraduating in Computer Science
> Federal University of Para - UFPA
> web: http://www.openbsd-pa.org
> e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
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