note 95779 modified in function.crack-check by danbrown

If you need to test a password with cracklib but don't have the necessary module available in PHP, you can use a function like this. It requires the command line cracklib-check binary in /usr/sbin, but changing its location is trivial. The $message variable will contain cracklib's complaint (if there is one) You'll want to wrap your invocation of this function in a try...catch block. <?php function cracklibCheck($password, &$message) { // Clean up password $password=str_replace("\r", "", $password); $password=str_replace("\n", "", $password); // Run password through cracklib-check exec("echo ".escapeshellarg($password)." | /usr/sbin/cracklib-check 2>/dev/null", $output, $return_var); // Check it ran properly if($return_var==0) { if(preg_match("/^.*\: ([^:]+)$/", $output[0], $matches)) { // Check response if(strtoupper($matches[1])=="OK") { // Password is strong $message=""; return(true); } else { // Cracklib doesn't like it $message=$matches[1]; return(false); } } else { // Badly formatted response from cracklib-check. throw new Exception("Didn't understand cracklib-check response."); } } else { // Some sort of execution error throw new Exception("Failed to run cracklib-check."); } } ?> --was-- If you need to test a password with cracklib but don't have the necessary module available in PHP, you can use a function like this. It requires the command line cracklib-check binary in /usr/sbin, but changing its location is trivial. The $message variable will contain cracklib's complaint (if there is one) You'll want to wrap your invocation of this function in a try...catch block. function cracklibCheck($password, &$message) { // Clean up password $password=str_replace("\r", "", $password); $password=str_replace("\n", "", $password); // Run password through cracklib-check exec("echo ".escapeshellarg($password)." | /usr/sbin/cracklib-check 2>/dev/null", $output, $return_var); // Check it ran properly if($return_var==0) { if(preg_match("/^.*\: ([^:]+)$/", $output[0], $matches)) { // Check response if(strtoupper($matches[1])=="OK") { // Password is strong $message=""; return(true); } else { // Cracklib doesn't like it $message=$matches[1]; return(false); } } else { // Badly formatted response from cracklib-check. throw new Exception("Didn't understand cracklib-check response."); } } else { // Some sort of execution error throw new Exception("Failed to run cracklib-check."); } } http://php.net/manual/en/function.crack-check.php