A.P. Lawrence

This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

There is lots of Linux, Mac OS X and general Unix info elsewhere on this site: Search this site is the best way to find anything.

Unix, Xenix and ODT General FAQ

How can I transfer SCO accounts (passwd information) to Linux?

If the SCO passwd file has the encrypted password in its second field (in other words, the system isn't using /etc/shadow), then this simple script will work:

 IFS=":"
 cat scopasswdfile | while read line
 do
 set $line
 useradd -c $5 -p $2 -s /bin/bash -d /home/$1 -m $1
 done

This requires a current version of "useradd"; the older versions don't take encrypted passwords with -p

Normally, however, the encrypted passwords will be in /etc/shadow. This needs a little more work:

 sort scopasswd > /tmp/p1
 sort scoshadow > /tmp/p2
 join -t: /tmp/p1 /tmp/p2 > /tmp/pscopass
 IFS=":"
 cat /tmp/pscopass | while read line
 do
 set $line
 useradd -c $5 -p $8 -s /bin/bash -d /home/$1 -m $1
 done

Note that only the first 13 characters in the non-shadow passwd file are the encrypted password; the rest (stuff after the comma) is for password aging: see "man F passwd".

J.P. Radley abserved: "it be easier to ditch the shadow file and reconstruct it, by running pwunconv, grabbing a copy of /etc/passwd, then running pwconv?".