UNIX password expiration time setting

Question

Where and how exactly I can set the expiration time of password of users i.e.the time after which the UNIX OS prompts user after giving some warnings that your password will expire with in n days and then expire the user's password?

Answer 1

But you need to use the passwd command with the maxdays and warndays set:

e.g. passwd --maxdays 10 --warndays 5 user

would set the maxdays between password changes as 10, and give 5 days warning.

EDIT: So if you have a list of usernames in a text file one per line then the following might work:

cat usernamelist | while read $a; do passwd --maxdays 10 --warndays 5 $a; done

Answer 2

Maybe you want to take a look at the chage command.

chage -l john



Last password change                                    : May 22, 2007
Password expires                                        : never
Password inactive                                       : never
Account expires                                         : never
Minimum number of days between password change          : 0
Maximum number of days between password change          : 99999
Number of days of warning before password expires       : 7

Answer 3

It is not part of the Unix standard, and is completely different depending on what OS you are using, and if you are using some sort of directory service. If you want to know you need to specify what OS you are using, and if it is Linux you probably need to specify what distro.