Question : Solaris 7 "no shell" on root, su not working, su parameters for shell?

Solaris 7
Stupidly fatfingered the /etc/passwd root account shell from bin/sh to bin/csh (invalid).
Now when trying to login says "no shell". Telnet has the same problem with su.
Isn't there a way in su to add parameters for the SHELL variable?
The man page seems to indicate this is so.
Isn't there any other way to edit the /etc/passwd file?
I started thinking about this and this means that if the /etc/passwd file ever
corrupts (through no stupidity of my own :-) then the user is locked out.
Besides booting from the CDROM and editing the /etc/passwd file and then
rebooting is there another way with chown, chgrp, or chmod to get around this?
Again, I know this was stupid and I sure won't be doing this again :-(
ixeye

Answer : Solaris 7 "no shell" on root, su not working, su parameters for shell?

> Isn't there any other way to edit the /etc/passwd file?

There is sometimes a vipw command but it probably doesnt check for the correct shell path.

You should probably leave it as "sh" anyway, there used to be a problem (a few years ago now) where if you had a problem with some libraries the other shells (csh/ksh) would not work correctly and you could lock yourself out of the admin account.

With regard to your problem, you need root access to edit the passwd file so unless someone has a suid shell (they flippin well shouldnt have) or there is some other fancy "hack" you will have to bite the bullet and reboot from CD as you said before. Look on the bright side, the system is up and running, you just need to schedule some down time.