What's the difference between lpasswd and passwd commands?

Question

Studying the CentOS/RHEL sysadmin manual, I can't understand if there are or what are the differences between these commands.

Answer 1

passwd is a traditional unix command. lpasswd appears to belong to the libuser project, "a standardized interface for manipulating and administering user and group accounts."

% ls -li =passwd =lpasswd              
3149052 -rwsr-xr-x. 1 root root 30768 Feb 17  2012 /usr/bin/passwd
3155939 -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 33240 Jul 10  2015 /usr/sbin/lpasswd
% rpm -qf =passwd
passwd-0.77-4.el6_2.2.x86_64
% rpm -qf =lpasswd
libuser-0.56.13-8.el6_7.x86_64
% rpm -q --queryformat='%{URL}\n' libuser 
https://fedorahosted.org/libuser/

lpasswd lacks a setuid bit, so that's interesting.