passwd broken on Gentoo: "Critical error - immediate abort"
Submitted by Bram Schoenmakers on 17 October, 2007 - 20:30.
When changing a user password I got the error
s040391 bram # passwd
passwd: Critical error - immediate abort
passwd: Critical error - immediate abort
Hmm, something seems to be horribly broken on my Gentoo system. revdep-rebuild didn't show anything useful and re-emerging the 'shadow' package didn't help much either. Luckily, I found on some other site the Gentoo way of fixing this:
emerge -1 cracklib shadow
Et voila, it works again.
During this quest to this answer I learnt some new Linux commands too: vipw and vigr (changing /etc/passwd and /etc/group the right way). Some voice in my head tells me I should be ashamed of not knowing these commands after having used Linux for more than 7 years.
Rare that re emerging
Rare that re emerging 'shadow' package didn't resolve your issue since emerge -1 cracklib shadow just re emerges the 'cracklib' and 'shadow' packages without adding them to 'world' file. I think that just 'emerge cracklib shadow' does the same think achieving the same result. Cheers