Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 205263
passwd 'status' feature request
Last modified: 2007-11-16 20:14:53 EST
Description of problem: The PAM Passwd util does not display account status information adequately. On a RHEL based system with /usr/bin/passwd (passwd rpm): [root@chipmail ~]# passwd -S miah Password set, MD5 crypt. On a system with Shadow Utils based passwd: miah@chia-pet ~ $ passwd -S miah miah P 06/20/2005 0 99999 7 -1 -S, --status Display account status information. The status information consists of 7 fields. The first field is the user's login name. The second field indicates if the user account is locked (L), has no password (NP), or has a usable password (P). The third field gives the date of the last password change. The next four fields are the minimum age, maximum age, warning period, and inactivity period for the password. These ages are expressed in days. On a system with a large amount of users it would be useful to determine when passwords were last changed and when they are about to expire. It would be possible to script this using the information in the sp_lstchg field from the shadow entry. However making the PAM Passwd util more compatible with the existing shadow suite would be more desirable.
This problem is resolved in the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat does not currently plan to provide a resolution for this in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux update for currently deployed systems. With the goal of minimizing risk of change for deployed systems, and in response to customer and partner requirements, Red Hat takes a conservative approach when evaluating changes for inclusion in maintenance updates for currently deployed products. The primary objectives of update releases are to enable new hardware platform support and to resolve critical defects. You can also use 'chage -l' command to obtain the status of the account.