script to change userID password

I have a file contain userID's and require to set inital password for all userId's in the file using pwdadm command.
When I run my script it prompt me with enter New password
please note pwdadm does not have option such as
pwdadm $name $passwd
it only works with pwdadm $name then it prompts for entering the new password.
What is wrong with my script


cat password.txt|while read name
do
pwdadm $name
echo newpaswd123 ###Assign new password
done

try read a good shell book first ?

Yes Thank you for advise
Can any one help

if so, you sure realized:

a) while read name =
read in $name a string until a blanc is encountered, you don't
check the IFS nor the input-strings, this works
only (and is an assumption) if pwd.txt contains:
userA
userB
..
userX

nota, i prefer the syntax:

for name in `cat file`
do
...
done

2) pwdadm $name
i don't know this prog, but i suppose it expect an user-name
AND an input (maybe with confirmation)

3) echo newpaswd123
prints on standard-output (also mostly tty) the string new...
this is NOT the input of 'pwdadm'

4) in *nix, only the first 8 chars are significant, so
newpaswd123 and newpaswd999 ARE the same.

----------------

i see two way to do it
1) install and use 'expect'
2) manually crypt the newpwd, replace the crypted pwd in
/etc/[passwd|shadow] or nis-table and hope it works.
(using the right tool, a child's play)

expect is available as part of gnu utils. If you don't have expect (a very good solution to your problem) - and I am not familair with pwdadm either because as I remember it's an AIX thing - you need to give us a sample session for one user.

On a lot of systems, sysadmins use passwd to alter passwords for user accounts - I assume you can do that on AIX as well?