A new policy requires the password of the existing account `alice` to be replaced at least every 90 days. Which TWO commands set that maximum password age? (Choose two.)
LPIC-1 Exam 102-500, objective 110. Security easy
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
Choose 2.
Correct chage -M 90 alice
Correct. -M is chage's maximum password age in days, written to the fifth field of the account's /etc/shadow line.
Correct passwd -x 90 alice
Correct. passwd -x sets the same maximum-days field; the ageing options of passwd and chage write to identical places in /etc/shadow.
Not correct chage -m 90 alice
Wrong. Lowercase -m is the minimum age: it would stop alice changing her password again for 90 days, the opposite constraint.
Not correct chage -W 90 alice
Wrong. -W only sets how many days before expiry the warning starts appearing at login; it does not move the expiry itself.
Not correct usermod -e 90 alice
Wrong. usermod -e sets the account expiry date, not password ageing, and interprets a bare number as days since the epoch rather than a validity period.
Why
The maximum password age lives in the fifth field of /etc/shadow, and both `chage -M DAYS` and `passwd -x DAYS` write it. Watch the case of chage's ageing flags: -M is maximum days, -m is minimum days, -W is the warning window, -I the inactive grace after expiry and -E the account expiry date. `chage -l alice` prints all of them in words, which is the quickest way to confirm a change landed where you intended.
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
- During an audit you must list every file under /usr that has the set-user-ID bit set, regardless of what its other permission bits are. Which command does that? machine-checked
- You locked the password of the account `intern` and confirmed that its hash in /etc/shadow now begins with an exclamation mark. The intern nevertheless still reaches a shell on the host over SSH, without being prompted for anything. What is going on, and what actually stops it? machine-checked
- You have just been added to a sudo rule on a host and want sudo itself to report which commands you are allowed to run there, without running any of them. Type the complete command. machine-checked
- A daemon started from your bash session keeps hitting a 'too many open files' error. Which command raises the limit on open file descriptors for the current shell and the processes it starts to 4096? machine-checked
- You are about to take a server down for maintenance and want ordinary users refused at login for the next hour, with an explanatory message, while root can still get in. On a system using PAM's pam_nologin, creating which file achieves this? machine-checked
- Which two commands report the users who are logged in right now, rather than a history of past logins? (Choose two.) machine-checked