How to generate password hashes for vipw and chpass

[Ivan "Rambius" Ivanov]

Hello,

According to man pages of chpass(1) and vipw(1)  I can create and
modify users by supplying a user database entry in passwd(5) format.
The only problem I face is that I do not know how to generate the
password hashes for the password field.

Following section 14.4
[http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/crypt.html] from the
handbook I found out that my system is using md5 to encrypt the
passwords. I tried to use /sbin/md5 to generate the hash:

# /sbin/md5 -s newpassword

and then I passed the output to chpass. I tried to use the new
password for the next login but it failed - so I believe this is
wrong.

Can you please show me how to generate the password hashes?

Regards
Rambius

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