Shadow File Last Changed Question

kechlion · 08-31-2010, 08:05 AM

I just had a question about a shadow file that I'm looking at. One of the attributes for each user is the last time the password was changed since 1/1/1970. It has listed that a user account has this set to 1. This would indicate that on that day in 1970 the password was set and never changed which would be impossible. Does anyone know how this would happen without someone going in and actually changing the file?

Thanks!

unSpawn · 08-31-2010, 08:51 AM

Dunno. Does 'stat' output of the file correlate with other recent changes? Not much nfo really. Maybe it's installation defaults?

anomie · 08-31-2010, 04:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kechlion

I just had a question about a shadow file that I'm looking at. One of the attributes for each user is the last time the password was changed since 1/1/1970. It has listed that a user account has this set to 1. This would indicate that on that day in 1970 the password was set and never changed which would be impossible. Does anyone know how this would happen without someone going in and actually changing the file?

What OS / version?

Maybe someone set it and other relevant attributes that way using chage(1) -- i.e. to force a password change. That wouldn't be so strange.

Also, triple-check to be sure it's really "1" and not "-1" (the latter is also legit).