On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 13:26:37 -0500, Mike wrote:

> I let my Linux SMP machine lie dormant for a number of months. I am trying
> to bring the system "to life" again, but in the interim had several user
> accounts become expired, how do I re-activate those accounts without
> deleting them and recreating them?
>
> I am a bit concerned as the man page for adding new users states, and I am
> paraphrasing, that when an account expiration date passes, the account is
> permanently disabled. I don't have too much in the user directories, but
> this could be a rather large problem when I start to do development on this
> machine.
>
> I am using SuSE 8.0 Pro, but the question is one of a more general concern,
> and I don't believe it to be specific to any distro.
>
> Is there a command that will re-active the existing account without
> disturbing the user file structure.
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Mike

"usermod -U username"

From the passwd(5) man page ('man -S5 passwd'...S5 refers to section 5):


-U Unlock a user's password. This removes the '!' in front of the encrypted password. You
can't use this option with -p or -L.

The encrypted password it refers to is in the /etc/shadow file (man -S5
shadow)


--Dave