A contractor's account `bob` must be disabled on 31 December 2026, whatever the state of his password on that date. Which command sets that?
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 110. Security 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 bob
Correct. -E sets the account expiry date in the eighth field of /etc/shadow; from that date the account is disabled outright rather than merely prompting for a new password.
Not correct chage -M 2026-12-31 bob
Wrong. -M is the maximum password age and expects a number of days, not a date. It expires the password, which prompts for a change, and it would reject this argument.
Not correct chage -W 2026-12-31 bob
Wrong. -W is the warning period in days before password expiry, controlling only when the user starts being reminded.
Not correct passwd -e bob
Wrong. passwd -e expires the password immediately, forcing a change at the next login. The account itself remains usable and no future date is involved.
Why
Password ageing and account expiry are separate mechanisms in /etc/shadow. The password fields (-m minimum days, -M maximum days, -W warning days, -I inactive days) govern when a password must be replaced; the account expiry field, set with chage -E as a date in YYYY-MM-DD form or as days since the epoch, disables the login as a whole. usermod -e writes the same field. Use -E when access must end on a known date and -M when a password must merely be rotated.
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 110 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
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