PASSWD(1)

NAME
passwd - change user password

SYNOPSIS

passwd [options] [LOGIN]

DESCRIPTION

The passwd command changes passwords for user accounts. A regular user can only change the password for their own account, while the superuser can change the password for any account. The passwd also changes the account or associated password validity period.

  Password Changes

If the account has a non-empty password, the user is first prompted to enter their current password. The entered password is encrypted and compared to the stored value. The user has only one attempt to enter the correct password. The superuser can bypass this step to allow changing forgotten passwords.

After the password has been entered, password aging information is checked to determine if the user is permitted to change the password at this time. If not, passwd refuses to change the password and exits.

The user is then prompted twice for a replacement password. The second entry is compared against the first and both are required to match for the password to be changed.

Then, the password is tested for complexity. passwd rejects passwords that do not meet the complexity requirements. Do not include the system default erase or kill characters.

  Hints for user passwords

The security of a password depends on the strength of the hashing method and the size of the key space. The hashing method can be selected with ENCRYPT_METHOD. The size of the key space depends on the randomness of the selected password.

Compromises in password security normally result from careless password selection or handling. For this reason, you should not select a password which appears in a dictionary or one that must be written down. The password should also not be a proper name, your license number, birth date, or street address. Any of these may be used as guesses to violate system security.

As a general guideline, passwords should be long and random. It's fine to use simple character sets, such as passwords consisting only of lowercase letters, if that helps memorizing longer passwords. For a password consisting only of lowercase English letters randomly chosen, and a length of 32, there are 26^32 (approximately 2^150) different possible combinations. Being an exponential equation, it's apparent that the exponent (the length) is more important than the base (the size of the character set).

You can find advice on how to choose a strong password on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength

OPTIONS

The options which apply to the passwd command are:

-a, --all
    This option can be used only with -S and causes show status for all users.

-d, --delete
    Deletes a user's password, making it empty. This command sets the account to be passwordless.

-e, --expire
    Immediately expire an account's password. This in effect can force a user to change their password at the user's next login.

-h, --help
    Display help message and exit.

-i, --inactive INACTIVE
    This option is used to disable an account after the password has been expired for a number of days. After a user account has had an expired password for INACTIVE days, the user may no longer sign on to the account.

-k, --keep-tokens
    Indicate password change should be performed only for expired authentication tokens (passwords). The user wishes to keep their non-expired tokens as before.

-l, --lock
    Lock the password of the named account. This option disables a password by changing it to a value which matches no possible encrypted value (it adds a ´!´ at the beginning of the password).

    Note that this does not disable the account. The user may still be able to login using another authentication token (e.g. an SSH key). To disable the account, administrators should use usermod --expiredate 1 (this sets the account's expire date to 1970-01-02).

    Users with a locked password are not allowed to change their password.

-q, --quiet
    Quiet mode.

-r, --repository REPOSITORY
    change password in REPOSITORY repository

-R, --root CHROOT_DIR
    Apply changes in the CHROOT_DIR directory and use the configuration files from the CHROOT_DIR directory. Only absolute paths are supported. No SELINUX support.

-P, --prefix PREFIX_DIR
    Apply changes to configuration files under the root filesystem found under the directory PREFIX_DIR. This option does not chroot and is intended for preparing a cross-compilation target. Some limitations: NIS and LDAP users/groups are not verified. No PAM support. No SELINUX support.

-S, --status
    Display account status information. The status information consists of 7 fields. The first field is the user's login name. The second field indicates if the user account has a locked password (L), has no password (NP), or has a usable password (P). The third field gives the date of the last password change. The next four fields are the minimum age, maximum age, warning period, and inactivity period for the password. These ages are expressed in days.

-u, --unlock
    Unlock the password of the named account. This option re-enables a password by changing the password back to its previous value (to the value before using the -l option).

-w, --warndays WARN_DAYS
    Set the number of days of warning before a password change is required. The WARN_DAYS option is the number of days prior to password expiration during which the user is warned that their password is about to expire.

-x, --maxdays MAX_DAYS
    Set the maximum number of days a password remains valid. After MAX_DAYS, the password is required to be changed.

    Passing the number -1 as MAX_DAYS will remove checking a password's validity.

-s, --stdin
    This option is used to indicate that passwd should read the new password from standard input, which can be a pipe.

CAVEATS

Password complexity checking may vary from site to site. The user is urged to select a password as complex as he or she feels comfortable with.

Users may not be able to change their password on a system if NIS is enabled and they are not logged into the NIS server.

passwd uses PAM to authenticate users and to change their passwords.

FILES

/etc/passwd
    User account information.

/etc/shadow
    Secure user account information.

/etc/pam.d/passwd
    PAM configuration for passwd.

EXIT VALUES

The passwd command exits with the following values:

0
    success

1
    permission denied

2
    invalid combination of options

3
    unexpected failure, nothing done

4
    unexpected failure, passwd file missing

5
    passwd file busy, try again

6
    invalid argument to option

10
    an error was returned by pam(3)

SEE ALSO

chpasswd(8), makepasswd(1), passwd(5), shadow(5), usermod(8).

The following web page comically (yet correctly) compares the strength of two different methods for choosing a password: "https://xkcd.com/936/"