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chfn(1) — Linux manual page

CHFN(1)                       User Commands                      CHFN(1)

NAME

       chfn - change real user name and information

SYNOPSIS

       chfn [options] [LOGIN]

DESCRIPTION

       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.

OPTIONS

       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.

CONFIGURATION

       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.

FILES

       /etc/login.defs
           Shadow password suite configuration.

       /etc/passwd
           User account information.

SEE ALSO

       chsh(1), login.defs(5), passwd(5).

COLOPHON

       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
       pkg-shadow-devel@alioth-lists.debian.net.  This page was obtained
       from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow⟩ on 2024-06-15.  (At that
       time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2024-06-13.)  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
       man-pages@man7.org

shadow-utils 4.14.0            06/15/2024                        CHFN(1)