Change days between password change with chage command in Linux

The chage command changes the number of days between password changes and the date of the last password change. This information is used by the system to determine when a user must change their password.

The chage command is installed with the passwd package, which can be install using the default package manager (apt, yum, pacman, dnf, etc.). The chage program requires a shadow (/etc/shadow) password file to be available which stores secure user account information. It's behavior can changed by editing the /etc/login.defs configuration file.

Syntax: chage [options] LOGIN

If none of the options are selected, chage operates in an interactive fashion, prompting the user with the current values for all of the fields. Enter the new value to change the field, or leave the line blank to use the current value. The current value is displayed between a pair of [ ] marks.

It is restricted to the root user, except for the -l option, which may be used by an unprivileged user to determine when their password or account is due to expire.

Exit codes for chage command:

List password information for the user:

Here, we have used chage command to list password expiry information for the specified user name: "user"

$ chage --list usernam

Enable password expiration in 10 days:

We can set a maximum number of days between password change with -M or --maxdays flag to the chage command as follows:

$ sudo chage --maxdays 10 username

Disable password expiration:

To disable password expiration, we can specify a negative value (-1) to maxdays parameter (--maxdays) with chage command in Linux:

$ sudo chage --maxdays -1 username

Set account expiration date:

Set an account expiration date with chage command using the --expirydate flag as follows:

$ sudo chage --expiredate YYYY-MM-DD username

Force user to change password on next log in:

To expire a password immediately and set new with chage command in Linxu terminal, we can use --lastday flag as follows:

$ sudo chage --lastday 0 username