Plenty of people use shared hosting. The unix security model isn't amazing, but it does a reasonable job of protecting you from users other than root -- puttin

Plenty of people use shared hosting. The unix security model isn't amazing, but it does a reasonable job of protecting you from users other than root -- putting cleartext passwords in command line arguments is one way of throwing that away. Then again, as you seem to be saying, manipulating cleartext passwords are usually a bad idea in the first place