Editing /etc/passwd to disable password not working

[Santanu Chatterjee]

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.

Thanks and regards,
Santanu