2.6 Changing Your Password and Shell

Use the passwd command to change your password. You’ll be asked for your old password and then prompted for your new password twice.

The best passwords tend to be long “nonsense” sentences that are easy to remember. The longer the password (in terms of character length), the better; try for 16 characters or more. (In the very old days, the number of characters you could use was limited, so you were advised to add strange characters and such.)

You can change your shell with the chsh command (to an alternative such as zsh, ksh or tcsh), but keep in mind that this book assumes you’re running bash, so if you make a change, some of the examples may not work.