I missed Greg's response to this question ... but did you see the responses
from Lawson, Richard, and me? We all said basically the same thing -- the
"passwd" program requires you to enter first your old password, then the new
one. Hence, it has both passwords available in **unencrypted** form and can
readily do any comparisons it cares to. The **encrypted** forms are quite
irrelevant.
If you are curious about other details of how passwd does this, the old
edition of Programming Perl has a nice, extended example of a perl
replacement for passwd that does an assortment of "good password" checks.
At 08:51 AM 5/4/00 +0400, V.Vasant wrote:
>Hi,
> I think I spelled the question wrongly.What I want to know is ,
> if the new password supplied matches even slightly the earlier
>one,a message is printed saying it is too similar to the earlier one.But
>since the earlier one is stored only in an encrypted form , how does it
>figure out whether the new one matches the earlier or not? .The encrypted
>forms should be different.
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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