Figure 6-3, for example, shows a password generator in the Users and Groups tool
available in Ubuntu.
Assuming you type your old password correctly, the passwd command will prompt you for the
new password. When you type in your new password, the passwd command checks the password
against cracklib to determine if it is a good or bad password. Non-root users will be required to
try a different password if the one they have chosen is not a good password.
The root user is the only user who is permitted to assign bad passwords. Once the password has
been accepted by cracklib, the passwd command asks you to enter the new password a second
time to make sure there are no typos (which are hard to detect when you can??™t see what you are
typing). When running as root, it is possible to change a user??™s password by supplying that user??™s
login name as a parameter to the passwd command. For example:
# passwd joe
Changing password for user joe.
New UNIX password: ********
Retype new UNIX password: ********
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
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Running the Show Part II
FIGURE 6-3
Generating random passwords
Here the passwd command prompts you twice to enter a new password for joe. It does not
prompt you for his old password in this case.
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