/etc/passwd weirdness: HELP NEEDED!!!

[Thomas Tornblom TM/JU 99367]

In article <26742448.24987 at paris.ics.uci.edu> wngai at bonnie.ics.uci.edu (Wayne Ngai) writes:
>Yesterday, I put a "vi" job to the background on a RISC/os (system V unix)
>system.  The terminal hung on me.   I kill off the vi and the shell processor.
>Well, ever since after that, I can't login from that particular terminal.
>It gives me the login prompt, but when I enter the user name, the system
>tells me that "Sorry, can not find your password"  or something close to
>that.
>	Does anyone out there knows what's going on?  And{what went wrong?
>And how should I fix it???  I'll take any suggestion!@!!!!
>
>
>Thanks for all your help in advance!!
>
>Wayne

The problem is that some of the processes you had haven't died properly.
In system V, if someone is using your terminal port you wont get a /dev/tty
for the new login process and getpass(3) opens /dev/tty and turns off echo
before reading your password, this wil fail as the open of /dev/tty will fail,
hence the error message.

Check out (with ps) for the offending process and kill it.
Some implementations may have broken drivers that hangs with high priority
and won't kill the process even with 'kill -KILL'. In that case the only remedy
is to re-boot the machine.

Thomas