[Techtalk] resetting a password

[Mary Gardiner]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2001 at 06:05:02PM -0500, Jennifer Davis wrote:
> I am surprised this has not come up earlier.  A friend reinstalled
> windows, or at least had it reinstalled on her pc, who had a mailbox on my
> linux box, forgot what her password was.  I never knew what it was?  Is
> there a way of retreiving them or reseting them?  By the way, it's a slack
> 8 system.

I take it you mean that you, the root user, want to reset her password?

There is no way to retrieve it - the passwords are stored using a
one-way hash (a mathematical function that is difficult to reverse), but
it can be reset.

If I wanted to reset the password for the user 'mary', then I would type
"passwd mary" as root. It will ask for the new password to be entered.

-Mary.

-- 
Mary Gardiner
<mary at puzzling.org>