Editing /etc/passwd to disable password not working

[Mark Widdicombe]

On 1 March 2012 11:26, Santanu Chatterjee <thisissantanu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Everybody,
>
> I tried to disable the password of an account on my home ubuntu 11.04
> box, by blanking the 2nd field of the corresponding user line in
> /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow file. However, whenever I try to login to
> the user account I am still being asked for the password and just
> pressing 'enter' is not working.
>
> Is there something else that I should be doing? IIRC, I have tried
> this some time back in probably ubuntu 8.10 (or maybe some lower
> version) and it used to work.

passwd -d