The _effect_ of what you do (make an "impossible hash") is the way, as far as I know -- whether its vipw, passwd -l, whatever... Regardless -- I'm not trying t

The _effect_ of what you do (make an "impossible hash") is the way, as far as I know -- whether its vipw, passwd -l, whatever... Regardless -- I'm not trying to diminish your solution, nor Linux; I elided over the usermod example in the grandparent (didn't recognize it at all), but interestingly, as I look on my NetBSD system,there is a usermod(8), with a -p for already hashed passwords. As I test it though, it rejects '!' as an argument: # usermod -p ! jnk usermod: Can't modify user `jnk': invalid password: `!'