PASSWD(1)

📦
version 4.20.0.arch1 · 25 versions
, in arch rolling

💖 PASSWD(1) — the manual, but make it make sense 💖

okay so bestie, you're reading the manual page for passwd, from the User Commands chapter of the manual. It's the one that changes your password. Yes, that one. Sit down, we're doing this together. 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

passwd — change user password. that's it. that's the whole vibe. 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

passwd [options] [LOGIN]

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So passwd changes the passwords for user accounts. Here's the tea on who can do what: a regular user can only change the password for their own account, but the superuser can change the password for any account. Also, passwd changes the account or associated password validity period too. multitasking icon. 👑

🌸 Password Changes 🌸

If the account has a non-empty password, the user gets prompted first to enter their current password. The entered password gets encrypted and compared to the stored value. And here's the thing — you get only one attempt to enter the correct password. One. Single. Try. 😭 The superuser can bypass this step to allow changing forgotten passwords, though. slay.

Once the password has been entered, password aging information is checked to determine if the user is even permitted to change the password at this time. If not, passwd refuses to change the password and exits. like, no. 🚫

Then the user is 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. (typo check but make it survival)

Then the password is tested for complexity. passwd rejects passwords that do not meet the complexity requirements. And listen — do not include the system default erase or kill characters. just don't. 🙈

🦋 Hints for user passwords 🦋

The security of a password depends on two things: 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. randomness is the moment. ✨

Compromises in password security normally result from careless password selection or handling. So 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. so like… don't use your birthday, babe. 💀

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). length ate and left no crumbs. 📏

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. (passwordless era 🔓)
  • -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). welcome back bestie 🫶
  • -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. rough. 😭

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/" — go read it, it's giving correctness with humor. 🎀

okay that's the whole page, you made it, I'm so proud of you 🫶 this was shadow-utils 4.20.0, dated 07/30/2026. go change that password to something long and random, bestie. periodt. 💅✨

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