Forcing users to change their passwords

[DerekK]

I guess that I'm not the first who ask that but i didn't found anything.

I'm running FC 3 and I would like to create a user account that forces the user to change his/her password the first time he/she log in... I'm not using XWindows.

I do the following to create it:

adduser -m -s /bin/bash usrname

and then I set the password with:

passwd username

Thank you all.

[Cemetric]

Hey,

You need to pass the ‐e option to the passwd command.
This in will force a user to change his/her password at the user’s next login.

Let's say the user name is bob then you would need to type as root :

passwd -e bob

The next time the user bob logs in he will get a message that he needs to change his password.

Hope this is what you were looking for.

[EDIT] I forgot to mention it is like this on a SUSE linux ...don't know if it is the same on a Fedora but I suppose it is...someone will correct me if I'm wrong ...there are some linux specialst here [/EDIT]

[EDIT2] Have you done a passwd --help in the console ? Isn't it in there ? [/EDIT2]

C.

[DerekK]

Hi, thank you for the answer.

I found this "-e" googling but it doesn't work for fedora

Any suggestion?

[Cemetric]

I found a command on a redhat forum ...seeming this is the prerunner to Fedora it might work but you will need to test it.

The command is "chage"

You can give extra options like "-M days" this will give you:

Specify the maximum number of days for which the password is valid. When the number of days specified by this option plus the number of days specified with the -d option is less than the current day, the user must change passwords before using the account.

source

see if you find this command on your system ?

Apparently it should exist in Fedora according to this site

C.

[DerekK]

Indeed that was the command!

What I want to do is not to set an expiring password policy but force the user to set a proper password the first time he/she logs in. After some man reading (it isn't very intuitive ocmmand ) I solved the point in that way:

chage -M 9999 -d 1 username

This sets the password expire date arround year 2033 and the last change of that password arround 1970, so the first time the user logs in he/she must change the password but afterwards it won't expire in 25 years....

Thank you very much, I really appreciate your help.

[Cemetric]

Thank you very much, I really appreciate tour help.

No prob..glad to help.