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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | CONFIGURATION | FILES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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CHFN(1) User Commands CHFN(1)
chfn - change real user name and information
chfn [options] [LOGIN]
The chfn command changes user fullname, office room number,
office phone number, and home phone number information for a
user's account. This information is typically printed by
finger(1) and similar programs. A normal user may only change the
fields for her own account, subject to the restrictions in
/etc/login.defs. (The default configuration is to prevent users
from changing their fullname.) The superuser may change any field
for any account. Additionally, only the superuser may use the -o
option to change the undefined portions of the GECOS field.
These fields must not contain any colons. Except for the other
field, they should not contain any comma or equal sign. It is
also recommended to avoid non-US-ASCII characters, but this is
only enforced for the phone numbers. The other field is used to
store accounting information used by other applications.
The options which apply to the chfn command are:
-f, --full-name FULL_NAME
Change the user's full name.
-h, --home-phone HOME_PHONE
Change the user's home phone number.
-o, --other OTHER
Change the user's other GECOS information. This field is used
to store accounting information used by other applications,
and can be changed only by a superuser.
-r, --room ROOM_NUMBER
Change the user's room number.
-R, --root CHROOT_DIR
Apply changes in the CHROOT_DIR directory and use the
configuration files from the CHROOT_DIR directory. Only
absolute paths are supported.
-u, --help
Display help message and exit.
-w, --work-phone WORK_PHONE
Change the user's office phone number.
If none of the options are selected, chfn operates in an
interactive fashion, prompting the user with the current values
for all of the fields. Enter the new value to change the field,
or leave the line blank to use the current value. The current
value is displayed between a pair of [ ] marks. Without options,
chfn prompts for the current user account.
The following configuration variables in /etc/login.defs change
the behavior of this tool:
CHFN_RESTRICT (string)
This parameter specifies which values in the gecos field of
the /etc/passwd file may be changed by regular users using
the chfn program. It can be any combination of letters f, r,
w, h, for Full name, Room number, Work phone, and Home phone,
respectively. For backward compatibility, yes is equivalent
to rwh and no is equivalent to frwh. If not specified, only
the superuser can make any changes. The most restrictive
setting is better achieved by not installing chfn SUID.
/etc/login.defs
Shadow password suite configuration.
/etc/passwd
User account information.
chsh(1), login.defs(5), passwd(5).
This page is part of the shadow-utils (utilities for managing
accounts and shadow password files) project. Information about
the project can be found at
⟨https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow⟩. If you have a bug
report for this manual page, send it to
[email protected]. This page was obtained
from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow⟩ on 2023-12-22. (At that
time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2023-12-15.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
[email protected]
shadow-utils 4.11.1 12/22/2023 CHFN(1)
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HTML rendering created 2023-12-22 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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