Emergency /etc/passwd Recovery

Recover a corrupted /etc/passwd that has locked out all users including root.

A advanced Linux challenge worth 20 points. Solve it hands-on in a real Linux environment in your browser - no local setup, no fake shells.

The Challenge

A buggy user-management script merged entries in /etc/passwd — no newlines between them. All logins fail including root. The lab provides a corrupted copy at /tmp/test-passwd to practice the repair workflow.

Your tasks:

• Inspect /tmp/test-passwd — each entry must be on its own line with exactly 6 colons
• Find malformed lines: grep -v "^#" /tmp/test-passwd | awk -F: 'NF!=7'
• Repair the file manually using nano/sed — split merged entries onto separate lines
• Validate: awk -F: 'NF!=7 {print NR": "NF" fields: "$0}' /tmp/test-passwd (should print nothing)
• Write "RECOVERED" to /tmp/recovery_done.txt
• Run check to validate