On Sun, 1 Mar 1998 t97904ti@sfc.keio.ac.jp wrote:

>Whenever I want to access to my password related file (ex: passwd, vipw, etc)
>I get the following error message;
>
>password file is too busy.
>
>what the heck is this? 

vipw and their ilk which munge the password file use a file locking
scheme to avoid multiple people editing the password file at the same time.
You probably improperly quit killed or crashed such a program and it left
it's lock file around so new invocations of these commands think that the
password file is already being edited and they refuse to run and exit.
The solution is to remove the lock file, but I don't remeber what these
files are called. if you haven't done a lot of stuff in your /etc lately
then a ls -ltr /etc will show the files in order based on when they were
last modified, you are probably looking for a file /etc/pw.XXXXX where
XXXXX is a number.  You will have to remove this file as root.

---------
Christopher R. Bowman
crb@ChrisBowman.com
My home page