121. Change a User 's PasswordBEFORE YOU BEGIN 117 About Administrative Responsibilities 118 Add a New User SEE ALSO 122 Delete a User All users (except those under parental controls) can change their own passwords. This is an essential part of conscientious computer usage. As a rule, you should change your password every six months or so, just as a precaution (and more frequently, such as every 30 days, in a business environment where the information on your computer is more sensitive). And as an Admin user, it will be your task to change users' passwords on a fairly regular basis, often because the users have forgotten them. To change your own password, you have to re-authenticate to make sure that you are the person who is currently logged in. Making you authenticate as the signed-in user is a precaution against someone sitting down at your login session and changing your password so that you can no longer log in. However, if you're an Admin user, you can change other users' passwords without authenticating.
TIP If you're an advanced Unix user, resist the temptation to change your password using the command-line passwd command; this command does an incomplete job of updating your password in all locations throughout the system, including your Keychain. |