On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 06:07:18PM -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
I read this: http://www.aychedee.com/2012/03/14/etc_shadow-password-hash-formats/ But Fedora doesn't have mkpasswd by default, whereas passwd seems to only update shadow rather than outputting to stdout. And if there's a salt used I can't tell how that would be referenced.
It's generated by the crypt function in glibc — man 3 crypt, and scroll down to the "Glibc notes" section. Although I didn't dig further, that says that the characters in the resulting string are drawn from the set [a-zA-Z0-9./]; I assume that it's the same number as would be found in a sha512sum hash, except mapped to that instead of represented as a long hexadecimal number. (If you do want to dig further, I suppose sha512-crypt.c is the place to look.)
If you want to generate such a string yourself, using the crypt function seems like the easiest way (of course using the python crypt module or whatever).