On Thu, Feb 18, 1999 at 11:52:26PM -0600, Gabe Harriman wrote:
| Okay, somehow (I think xuser did it) my root account's shell entry
| in the passwd file was changed from :/root:/bin/tcsh to
| ::/root:/bin/tcsh .. so now, whenever i try and login as root it
| can't find my shell (which is now /root:/bin/tcsh). I cannot get into
| the root account via su and every other method i could think of has
| failed. Does anyone know a way to change the password file as root
| without actually logging in as root? Or to temporarily login as root
| using a shell other than the one specified in the passwd file? Thanks
| for your help.
1) hit return once in a while :)
2) boot your box from a rescue floppy, mount your root partition, then
use vi to edit your /etc/passwd file (probably mounted as
/mnt/etc/passwd) to fix it, then umount and reboot.
You might (but I doubt it) be able to do something like :
su root -c /bin/sh
(I expect that su will invoke root's shell and tell that to invoke
/bin/sh, which won't work. But it might not work that way ...)
Also, if it's Redhat, you might find this `su' option useful :
-s, --shell shell
Run SHELL instead of USER's shell from /etc/passwd,
unless the user running su is not the superuser and
USER's shell is restricted.
[ but I've never tried it ]
The booting off a floppy is the standard way of fixing things.
--
Doug McLaren, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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