| passwd(1) | modify a user's password |
| passwd, master.passwd(5) | format of the password file |
| PASSWD(1) | General Commands Manual | PASSWD(1) |
passwd —
passwd |
[user] |
passwd changes the user's password. If no
user is specified, the user's login name is used (see
logname(1)). First, the user is prompted
for their current password. If the current password is correctly typed, a new
password is requested. The new password must be entered twice to avoid typing
errors.
The new password should be at least six characters long and not
purely alphabetic. Its total length must be less than
_PASSWORD_LEN (currently 128 characters). A mixture
of both lower and uppercase letters, numbers, and meta-characters is
encouraged.
The quality of the password can be enforced by specifying an external checking program via the “passwordcheck” variable in login.conf(5).
The superuser is not required to provide a user's current password if only the local password is modified.
Password encryption parameters depend on the configuration of the “localcipher” capability in login.conf(5). If none is specified then blowfish is used, with the number of rounds selected based on system performance.
The password file is currently locked by another process;
passwd will keep trying to lock the password
file until it succeeds or you hit the interrupt character (control-C by
default). If passwd is interrupted while trying
to gain the lock the password change will be lost.
If the process holding the lock was prematurely terminated the
lock file may be stale and passwd will wait
forever trying to lock the password file. To determine whether a live
process is actually holding the lock, the admin may run the
following:
$ fstat /etc/ptmp
If no process is listed, it is safe to remove the /etc/ptmp file to clear the error.
Robert Morris and Ken Thompson, Password security: a case history, Communications of the ACM, Issue 11, Volume 22, pp. 594–597, Nov. 1979.
passwd command appeared in
Version 3 AT&T UNIX.
| April 23, 2019 | OpenBSD-current |