PWSCORE(1)

💖 PWSCORE — ok bestie, let's rate ur password 💖

Hiii so this is a page from the General Commands Manual (section 1, the user commands girlies) and it's about pwscore, which is a whole simple configurable tool for checking quality of a password. Yes, THAT kind of tool. The vibe check your password never asked for but lowkey needs. ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

pwscore — a simple configurable tool for checking quality of a password. It's giving password bouncer. It's giving "bestie, that's not it" energy. 🫶

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

pwscore [user]

That's it. That's the whole thing. One optional lil guy. Slay. 💅

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

Okay so, pwscore is a simple tool for checking quality of a password. And here's the thing — the password is read from stdin. So you're piping it in, not typing it as an argument, bestie. Don't be weird about it. 😭

The tool uses the libpwquality library to perform configurable checks for minimum length, dictionary checking against cracklib dictionaries, and other checks. So it's not just vibes — it's real math and real dictionaries. Iconic, honestly. 👑

Then it does one of two things:

• It either reports an error if the password fails any of the checks, or
• it prints out the password quality score as an integer value between 0 and 100.

Numbers. Between zero and one hundred. A whole glow-up scale for your little string of characters. 🌈

The password quality score is relative to the minlen setting in the configuration file. But in general values below 50 can be treated as moderate quality and above it fairly strong quality. So like, <50 = "hmm okay werk a little harder", >50 = "okay periodt, she's serving". 💅

And important — any password that passes the quality checks (especially the mandatory cracklib check) should withstand dictionary attacks, and scores above 50 with the default minlen setting even fast brute force attacks. Not me telling you that a good score means actual real-world security. No cap. 🔥

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💜 OPTIONS 💜

The first and only optional argument is the user name that is used to check the similarity of the password to the username.

• user — the optional username. pwscore uses it to check how similar your password is to the username. So if you're out here setting your password to your own username... bestie. It's gonna notice. It's gonna judge. 🙈

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🦋 FILES 🦋

• /etc/security/pwquality.conf — The configuration file for the libpwquality library. This is where all the settings live, including that minlen we keep talking about. Go read it, it's important. ✨

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🍓 RETURN CODES 🍓

pwscore returns 0 on success, non zero on error. Classic. Zero means "she passed the vibe check", non-zero means "nope, try again babe". 😭

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⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

• pwscore(1)
• pwquality.conf(5)
• pam_pwquality(8)

Go read them, iykyk. Sibling pages. The whole family. 🌸

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

Tomas Mraz <tmraz@redhat.com> — the icon, the legend, the moment. 🫶

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Just a lil reminder: this whole page comes to you courtesy of Red Hat, Inc., dated 2017-02-10. Shoutout to them for the manual, and shoutout to you for reading the whole thing. That's main character energy fr fr. 💖✨🎀