Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

Can anyone suggest, how or from where we can understand the expiry time of a linux id, whether login or ftp?

My concern is like, i want to know when the ftpid configured on an automated system will expire, so that i can configure some notice or email mentioning that the particular id is close to expiry.

Your help is appreciated and thanks in advance.


With Regards
Dileep Pattayath

The password expiration information is stored in /etc/shadow. A typical entry may look like this:

testuser:$1$DgtYUQyf$AbAvYwwEqSJHnsmCcfUg6/:14139:7:90:14:::

The bold number is the days since Jan 1, 1970 that password was last changed. 'man 5 shadow' for what the other fields are. You could write a shell/perl script to parse out these values and do some math to determine the actual day and then email on a certain condition (email user 14 days before password expiration, for example). This would require setting up .forward files or aliases for your users though.

The easiest way to see when a password is going to expire is to run 'chage -l USERNAME' from the command line.