How To Unlock An Account on Linux

Linux: Unlocking An Account Syntax

The syntax is as follows:

passwd -u {username}
sudo passwd -u username
# NOTE capital 'U' #
sudo usermod -U {username}

How To Unlock An Account on Linux

To unlock the password of the named account called vivek, type:

passwd -u vivek
## OR ##
sudo passwd -u vivek

This option re-enables a password by changing the password back to its previous value (to the value before using the -l option).

How to unlock Linux user account using the usermod

The usermod command modifies the system account files to reflect the specified changes on the Linux command line. In other words, we can use the following command to unlock the user account named sai:
sudo usermod -U sai

How to lock Linux user account

Open the terminal application and then type the following command:

sudo passwd -l userName
sudo passwd -l vivek

OR we can use the usermod command to Lock a user’s password:

usermod -L userName
sudo usermod -L sai

This puts a ! in front of the encrypted password, effectively disabling the password on Linux.

How to see password status on the named account

Want to find out if a password is locked or unlocked on Linux for a given user account? Try the following syntax:
passwd -S
sudo passwd -S vivek

Unlocking user account password under Linux

Summing up

We pass the -l option to the passwd command to lock the password of the given account. On other hand we pass the -u to the passwd command to unlock the password of the named account. We can also use the usermod command for same purposes. To get more help type the following commands or read documentation online:
man passwd
man 5 passwd
man usermod
passwd --help