How to Unlock a User Account in Linux?

Some times on Linux boxes the user account will be locked due to issues such as wrong password entry, account expiry etc. 

In this post I will show how to unlock user account with different commands.

Example 1: Check if the password is disabled by viewing /etc/shadow file for user entry.

   $ grep ‘username’ /etc/shadow

If you are able to see ! in the second field starting that indicates that password is disabled, you have to enable it back by using passwd with -u option

  $passwd -u username

Example:

   passwd -u mani

Unlocking password for user mani.

passwd: Success

Hope this post helps you to resolve this issue.

Thank you for reading out my blog!!