Chapter 12 Essential System Administration If needed, you can also temporarily disable an account, and reenable it at a later time if needed. Both disabling an account and reenabling an account can be done with passwd. To disable an account, do the following as root: #
passwd -l david
This will change david’s password to something that can never match any encrypted value. You would reenable the account by using: #
passwd -u david
Now, david’s account is back to normal. Disabling an account might be useful if the user doesn’t play by the rules you’ve set up on your system, or if they’ve exported a very large copy of xeyes(1) to your X desktop.
Changing User Information There are two pieces of information that users can change at any time: their shell and their finger information. Slackware Linux uses chsh (change shell) and chfn (change finger) to modify these values. ) &% )
A user can pick any shell that is listed in the file. For most people, /bin/bash will do just fine. Others might be familiar with a shell found on their system at work or school and want to use what they already know. To change your shell, use chsh: chsh Password: Changing the login shell for chris Enter the new value, or press return for the default Login Shell [/bin/bash]: %
After entering your password, enter the full path to the new shell. Make sure that it’s ) &% ) listed in the (5) file first. The root user can also change any user’s shell by running chsh with a username as the argument.
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