[TriLUG] Expiring passwords

[Jon Carnes]

On Mon, 2003-12-22 at 10:27, Chip Turner wrote:
> Jon Carnes <jonc at nc.rr.com> writes:
> 
> > On Mon, 2003-12-22 at 10:08, zzd wrote:
> > > How do you set/unset when a particular password expires via comman line. The 
> > > postgres account on my Mandrake system keeps having the password expire. Is 
> > > this a global or per user setting?
> > > -- 
> > > Z
> > 
> > man 5 shadow
> 
> It is almost always a bad idea these days to directly edit
> /etc/passwd, shadow, group, and gshadow.  Better is to use usermod and
> groupmod.  In this case in particular, 'usermod -e 2003-12-31 foo'
> will make foo's password expire on Dec 31, 2003.  Much easier and much
> less error prone.
> 
> Chip

Sorry Chip.  I'll stop being naughty by writing programs that do it
directly (as I have been doing for the past four years).... :-)

Perhaps you meant that there are alternatives to editing the values
directly - ones that might be safer for the novice to use?

Jon Carnes - naughty hacker of shadow values