[Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#621810: shadow: usermod and passwd man pages wrongly suggest `usermod -e 1` to expire account

[enok srd]

Package: shadow
Severity: normal

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The usermod and passwd man pages wrongly suggest [1] using

 usermod --expiredate 1 <user>

to expire accounts.  Both of

 chage --expiredate 1 <user>

and

 usermod --expiredate 1970-01-02 <user>

do the right thing, but

 usermod --expiredate 1 <user>

sets <user>'s account to expire TOMORROW, because "1" gets interpreted
as today's date! (I don't understand why, but it's probably related to
the gigantic bison grammar in getdate.y ...)

Suggested fix: `change usermod --expiredate` to handle numeric
arguments the same way chage does, and update the usermod man page
accordingly.

Here's some relevant code from usermod and chage in the most recent
source I could find
(ftp://pkg-shadow.alioth.debian.org/pub/pkg-shadow/shadow-4.1.4.3.tar.bz).
Note the isnum check in chage:

shadow-4.1.4.3/src/usermod.c:
   937                         case 'e':
   938                                 if ('\0' != *optarg) {
   939                                         user_newexpire =
strtoday (optarg);
   940                                         if (user_newexpire == -1) {
   941                                                 fprintf (stderr,
   942
_("%s: invalid date '%s'\n"),
   943                                                          Prog, optarg);
   944                                                 exit (E_BAD_ARG);
   945                                         }
   946                                         user_newexpire *= DAY / SCALE;
   947                                 } else {
   948                                         user_newexpire = -1;
   949                                 }
   950                                 eflg = true;
   951                                 break;

shadow-4.1.4.3/src/chage.c:
   419                 case 'E':
   420                         Eflg = true;
   421                         if (!isnum (optarg)) {
   422                                 expdate = strtoday (optarg);
   423                         } else if (   (getlong (optarg, &expdate) == 0)
   424                                    || (expdate < -1)) {
   425                                 fprintf (stderr,
   426                                          _("%s: invalid date '%s'\n"),
   427                                          Prog, optarg);
   428                                 usage ();
   429                         }
   430                         break;

I experienced this problem on an Ubuntu10.10 system, but I don't think
that's relevant.  Thanks,

-enoksrd

[1] The relevant man page entries:

The passwd man page says:

      -l, --lock
          Lock the password of the named account. This option
disables a password by changing it to a value which matches no
possible encrypted value
          (it adds a ´!´ at the beginning of the password).

          Note that this does not disable the account. The user may
still be able to login using another authentication token (e.g. an SSH
key). To
          disable the account, administrators should use usermod
--expiredate 1 (this set the accounts expire date to Jan 2, 1970).

          Users with a locked password are not allowed to change
their password.

and the usermod man page says:


      -L, --lock
          Lock a users password. This puts a ! in front of the
encrypted password, effectively disabling the password. You cant use
this option with -p
          or -U.

          Note: if you wish to lock the account (not only access with
a password), you should also set the EXPIRE_DATE to 1.

      -e, --expiredate EXPIRE_DATE
          The date on which the user account will be disabled. The
date is specified in the format YYYY-MM-DD.

See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=389183#122 where
the incorrect suggestion was added to passwd manual page.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
 APT prefers maverick-updates
 APT policy: (500, 'maverick-updates'), (500, 'maverick-security'),
(500, 'maverick-backports'), (500, 'maverick')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.35-28-generic (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash