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PASSWD(1) General Commands Manual PASSWD(1) NAME passwd - change login password SYNOPSIS passwd [ -an ] [ name ] DESCRIPTION This command changes a password associated with the user name (your own name by default). The program prompts for the old password and then for the new one. The caller must supply both. The new password must be typed twice, to forestall mistakes. New passwords must be at least four characters long if they use a suf- ficiently rich alphabet and at least six characters long if monocase. These rules are relaxed if you are insistent enough. Only the owner of the name or the super-user may change a password; the owner must prove he knows the old password. If the -a option is given, passwd prompts for new values of certain fields of the password file entry. The super-user may use the -n option to install new users. The prompts are self-explanatory, and most of the defaults obvious. A null re- sponse to the prompt assigns a numeric userid one greater than the largest one previously in A null response to assigns a home directory in If the first character of the response to this prompt is an aster- isk, the remaining characters are taken as the name of the new user's home directory, and a symbolic link to this directory is placed in If exists, each new user's home directory starts with a file name which is a copy of with \N replaced by the user's name, and \D replaced by the name of the home directory. FILES SEE ALSO crypt(3) passwd(5) Robert Morris and Ken Thompson, `UNIX password security,' AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal 63 (1984) 1649-1672 BUGS The password file information should be kept in a different data struc- ture allowing indexed access. PASSWD(1)