I used the terminal to change my password, but it's not applying the change

Question

I changed my password using sudo passwd. It worked fine, with no errors, but my password hasn't been changed. I rebooted, but that didn't fix anything. What am I doing wrong?

Solution

If you really used command sudo passwd (with no additional argument), then you changed the password for the root account - not your user account. In Ubuntu, which locks the root account by default, this will have had the side effect of unlocking the root account.

To change your own user account password, you should simply type

passwd

and follow the prompts. You can reset the default status of the root account by deleting the (new) root password and locking it using

sudo passwd -dl root

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To change a different user's account password, you would need sudo - but would follow the command by the account name:

sudo passwd otheruser

Comments

[TheWanderer]

Really? Interesting. I always thought you had to change (or create) the root password by running sudo passwd root. This is a nice shortcut, if I can remember it.