[fpc-pascal]How to change a users password on Linux

[A.J. Venter]

Hi,

I am working on a project that needs among other things to create Linux
users, and then set a password for them.

One way to do this is to use a program that can read the password from
stdin and just wrap around it, for example
echo "testusers:test" | chpasswd will change testuser's password to test
on Slackware.
Likewize redhat likes have a version of passwd that takes a --stdin
option, so you can do
echo "test" | passwd --stdin testuser 
Both these can only be run by root of course.

The problem is no system seems to support both, and I need maximum
distribution indepedance. Has anybody else done a frontend for user
management or similiar system ? Can anyone tell me how  to set a user's
password in a distribution independant way ?

TIA
A.J.