Dear monks,

I am looking for a (moderately) portable way of running system user authentication. I thought I understood from the perldocs that the following would work in an ideal world:

use strict;
use warnings;
my @pwstruct  = getpwnam('me');
my $plain     = '****';
my $encrypted = $pwstruct[1];

if ( crypt( $plain, $encrypted ) eq $encrypted ) {
        print "ok";
}
[download]

but it neither does on OSX (10.4, intel) nor on x86 red hat (not sure if these are "ideal world") so I guess I misunderstood. What am I missing?

Thank you!