add new user to httpasswd file

[Anon]

Hi, is there a php command to add a user to a password file? If so can you please send it to me and if not, how can I accomplish that?

I've tried using the following but it fails everytime and I can not determine why:

passthru("htpasswd -b -d /usr/home/me/password/.htpasswd username password",$retval);

The $retval variable comes back with 27 which is not an expected return value.

note, I also tried the exec as well as the system command but same result.

Any help would be great.
Thank you.
[e-mail]

[bretticus]

Okay, I'm no UNIX sytem admin here, but does your script need root permission do do this? Maybe somebody can reply to this post and we'll all know ;-)

[Anon]

You do not need root access to run htpasswd. htpasswd will run as the user it is invoked by. As a result, you do need write access to the .htpasswd file htpasswd will append to. So if PHP is an apache module, it is probably invoking htpasswd as the user nobody, which most likely has no write access to your .htpasswd file.

[Anon]

Sorry the return value is 127 not 27 as previously stated but I'm unsure as to what that value means.