A contractor's account `pkumar` must stop working entirely after 31 December 2026, whatever the state of their password at that date. Which command sets that?
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 107. Administrative tasks medium
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct chage -E 2026-12-31 pkumar
Correct. -E sets the account expiration date, the eighth field of /etc/shadow. On and after that date the account is disabled outright and no password, however fresh, will let it log in.
Not correct chage -M 2026-12-31 pkumar
Wrong. -M takes a number of days, not a date, and it sets the maximum password age — how long a password may be used before it must be changed. The account itself never expires from it.
Not correct chage -I 2026-12-31 pkumar
Wrong. -I takes a number of days and sets the inactivity period: how long after a password expires the account is tolerated before being disabled. It is relative to password expiry, not an absolute date.
Not correct chage -W 2026-12-31 pkumar
Wrong. -W takes a number of days and sets the warning period, controlling how many days before password expiry the user starts being nagged at login. It disables nothing.
Why
chage separates two independent clocks. The password clock is relative and measured in days: -m minimum age, -M maximum age, -W warning period, -I inactivity grace after expiry. The account clock is absolute: -E takes a date, or a count of days since 1970-01-01, and disables the account when it arrives. `chage -E -1` removes an expiry date again, and `usermod -e` writes the same field.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page chage(1)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 107 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- The account alice already belongs to the supplementary groups audio and video. You must additionally put her in the group developers while keeping her existing memberships. Which command does that? machine-checked
- A departing employee's account bob must be deleted together with his home directory and mail spool. Which command does all of that in one step? machine-checked
- You want every newly created account to start with a company-standard .bashrc already in its home directory. Where do you place that file? machine-checked
- On a host whose accounts come partly from local files and partly from a directory service, `grep alice /etc/passwd` returns nothing even though `id alice` works. Which command shows alice's account entry the way the system itself resolves it? machine-checked
- Policy says passwords must be changed at least every 90 days, and the account carol must comply. Which command sets that maximum password age? machine-checked
- A line in /etc/group reads `developers:x:1500:alice,bob`. What does the final field contain? machine-checked