I had a little bit of trouble on my Redhat 9 system trying to get smbpasswd to accept passwords on stdin so I can script it. All of the solutions I saw on the mailing list were of the general form: (echo <pass>; echo <pass>) | smbpasswd -s <username> For whatever reason, that didn't work for me. (note: I'm not much of a Bash programmer!) What did however, is: echo -n -e "$PASS1\n$PASS2" | smbpasswd -as $USERNAME The -n switch tells echo not to add a trailing newline character, and the -e switch tells it to interpret C-style escape characters, of which \n is the carriage-return escape code. This is also assuming $PASS1 is identical to $PASS2. Hope this helps someone! -- Nick Soracco <nick@hrd-aerosystems.com> HRD Aerosystems, Inc.