NAME

passwd — change a user's password

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The passwd utility changes a user's password: the caller's own, or, for the superuser only, that of user.

The change goes through the “passwd” PAM policy in /etc/pam.d/passwd. A user other than the superuser is first asked for their current password. The new password is asked for twice, hashed with SHA-512, and stored in /etc/master.passwd, after which /etc/passwd is regenerated as by pwd_mkdb(8). Changing the password clears any change time set for the account.

FILES

/etc/master.passwd

the account database

/etc/passwd

its public form

/etc/pam.d/passwd

the PAM policy

EXIT STATUS

The passwd utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

SEE ALSO

login(1), crypt(3), pam.conf(5), passwd(5), pwd_mkdb(8)

HISTORY

A passwd utility appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX. This implementation was written for OxideBSD.

BUGS

passwd must run as the superuser to write the account files, and OxideBSD does not yet honor the set-user-ID bit, so only the superuser can use it.