[PLUG] perl passwd locking

[Fred K Ollinger <follinge@sas.upenn.edu>]

I have a perl util (anyone who wants can have a copy) that distributes
passwds to many machines, it takes a list of passwds, then it adds some to
the passwd list so one could change their passwd on one machine, and it
will be soon be changed on all other machines.

My scripts all work out of cron and work flawlessly, but someoneo pointed
out that I was asking for a race condition which would hose the passwd
file if another process tried to access passwd file at the same time.

The debian shadow source code makes use of a c-interface for passwd
locking, but I can't find any perl interface in cpan nor anywhere else. Is
there such a util for passwd locking in perl? I will write one if I need
to, but I'd rather save the work instead of reinventing the wheel.

Thanks.

Fred Ollinger (follinge@sas.upenn.edu)
CCN sysadmin


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