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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | CAVEATS | FILES | EXIT VALUES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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PASSWD(1) User Commands PASSWD(1)
passwd - change user password
passwd [options] [LOGIN]
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
encryption algorithm and the size of the key space. The legacy
UNIX System encryption method is based on the NBS DES algorithm.
More recent methods are now recommended (see 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
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.
-n, --mindays MIN_DAYS
Set the minimum number of days between password changes to
MIN_DAYS. A value of zero for this field indicates that the
user may change their password at any time.
-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.
-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.
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.
/etc/passwd
User account information.
/etc/shadow
Secure user account information.
/etc/pam.d/passwd
PAM configuration for passwd.
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)
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/"
This page is part of the shadow-utils (utilities for managing
accounts and shadow password files) project. Information about
the project can be found at
⟨https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, send it to
[email protected]. This page was obtained
from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At that
time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2025-08-10.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
[email protected]
shadow-utils 4.18.0 08/11/2025 PASSWD(1)
Pages that refer to this page: ldappasswd(1), login(1), login(1@@shadow-utils), crypt(3), pts(4), login.defs(5), passwd(5), passwd(5@@shadow-utils), shadow(5), chpasswd(8), groupadd(8), groupdel(8), groupmems(8), groupmod(8), newusers(8), useradd(8), userdel(8), usermod(8)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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