On Tue, 8 Jun 1999, southwick wrote:

> I am brand new to NetBSD (and Unix in general).
> 
> I have successfully booted the latest version (at least the lastest from 
> NetBSD.org) on a Mac IIci and edited rc.conf to allow multiuser mode. I 
> log in as root in hopes of making other users, but when I try to run 
> vipw, I get an error saying the passwd file is busy. When I try to run 
> adduser, the command is not found.
> 
> Two questions present themselves:
> 
> 1)  Why is the passwd file busy, and how do I (can I) stop this?

You messed up an edit of the password file. Remove /etc/ptmp and the
password file won't still be busy. Use vipw to edit it. If the environment
variable EDITOR is set to something, that editor will be used instead of
vi.

The entries in /etc/master.passwd (the file you'll edit in vipw) are a
little different from historical unix. So I'd recomend copying a line and
editing it rather than typing in a line as it is in a book. We have extra
fields to deal with password expiration, etc.

Take care,

Bill