Linux: Set a users password to “never” expire.

In this article i will show you how to set a users password to never expire, to do this we will use the chage command, this command can be used interactively and non-interactively and in both cases must run with sudo or as root user

How to see the password expiration status of a user$ chage -l <username>
- sample output -
Last password change     : May 29, 2022
Password expires     : Jul 29, 2023
Password inactive     : never
Account expires      : never
Minimum number of days between password change  : 0
Maximum number of days between password change  : 90
Number of days of warning before password expires : 7

How to set the password expiration date for a user (interactively)$ sudo chage <username>
- sample output -
Changing the aging information for <username>
Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default

 Minimum Password Age [0]: Enter
 Maximum Password Age [90]: 99999
 Last Password Change (YYYY-MM-DD) [2021-09-30]: Enter
 Password Expiration Warning [7]: Enter
 Password Inactive [-1]: Enter
 Account Expiration Date (YYYY-MM-DD) [-1]: Enter

-1 as an option means never, this way we can set the “Account Expiration Date” to never

How to set the password expiration date for a user (as an one-liner)sudo chage -I -1 -m 0 -M 99999 -E -1 <username>

To ensure changes enter$ chage -l <username>
- sample output -
Last password change     : May 29, 2022
Password expires     : never
Password inactive     : never
Account expires      : never
Minimum number of days between password change  : 0
Maximum number of days between password change  : 99999
Number of days of warning before password expires : 7

Note that the above one-liner will change many other options as well like password expire setting, account expire etc.

I hope you found this short article interesting :)