Hello all,

I know my question may look silly but how do you create md5 passwords in Ubuntu? With my old Slackware, I just used to type:

Code:
crypt password_in_clear_text
and it returned me the md5 encoded version that I could simply copy-paste to /etc/passwd if I wished so (or feed it to other scripts or even an ldif file to use with ldapadd, for instance). I think it was a perl script, but wouldn't bet on it.

But I've tried this on my new Ubuntu (10.04) and got an error message explaining that crypt was not present on the system and that I should install the mcrypt package. Alas! This package is deemed buggy and unmaintained, by its very description in the repository. O^o

Google search left me in the impression that each tool (slapd, grub, perl...) had its own function to do this. But I didn't find anything generic to the system, which I find quite disturbing and awkward.

So, please, is there an official way to get md5 passwords from clear-text ones in command line?