Make operating system user non expiry

Many times proper functioning of application demands that the account/password of the OS (Linux/UNIX) user which owns the application should not expire.

chage is the OS command by which we can control the number of days between password changes and the date of the last password change.

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

Let us make password of ‘oracle’ OS user account as non-expiry.

1) CHECK THE CURRENT STATUS OF USER

# chage -l oracle

Last password change : May 29, 2013
Password expires : Aug 27, 2013
Password inactive : Sep 10, 2013
Account expires : never
Minimum number of days between password change : -1
Maximum number of days between password change : 90
Number of days of warning before password expires : 14

2) CHANGE AND MAKE IT NON-EXPIRY

# chage -m -1 -M -1 -I -1 -E -1 oracle

Where:

[-m mindays]
[-M maxdays]
[-d lastday]
[-I inactive]
[-E expiredate]
[-W warndays]

3) VERIFY

[root@rclnperp20 ~]# chage -l oracle

Last password change : May 29, 2013
Password expires : never
Password inactive : never
Account expires : never
Minimum number of days between password change : -1
Maximum number of days between password change : -1
Number of days of warning before password expires : 14