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I apologize if this question is too basic, but I'm really very very new to perl. Now I want to write the following two lines of code in one line:

perl -e 'print crypt("my_password","\$6\$my_salt\$")'

perl -pe 's|(root):(\$.*?:)|\1:my_encrypted_password:|' /etc/shadow

Basically I want to replace the my_encrypted_password with what's being printed from the first line. But I have no idea how to write it correctly? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

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    I'm not sure if modifying /etc/shadows with perl is really a good idea... Commented Jul 18, 2015 at 11:41
  • I'm trying to mount the virtual machine's disk to the host and reset the virtual machine's root password. Commented Jul 18, 2015 at 11:47
  • 1
    Maybe passwd -R might be a better solution. Commented Jul 18, 2015 at 11:56
  • @michas can you make it a bit more clear how to use passwd -R? Thanks. Commented Jul 18, 2015 at 12:43
  • Have a look at man passwd. Just add the mount point of your VM disk and passwd should use the shadow file there. Commented Jul 20, 2015 at 5:36

1 Answer 1

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You probably mean something like this:

perl -pe 's|(?<=root:)[^:]*|crypt("my_password","\$6\$my_salt\$")|e' /etc/shadow

From perldoc perlre:

    Substitution-specific modifiers described in

    "s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/msixpodualngcer" in perlop are:

      e  - evaluate the right-hand side as an expression

On the right side you can use $& to refer to the matching part and $1 for the first captured part and so on.

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