Let's say you're logged in as seawolf. For security reasons, you want to update your weak password (hello123, whoops!) to a strong secure one. We know that the password is stored in the /etc/passwd file. Well, we also saw that on modern Unixes (including Linux of course), for better security it's shadowed: it's actually stored in a file called /etc/shadow. Let's check it out:
$ ls -l /etc/shadow-rw-r----- 1 root shadow 891 Jun 1 2017 /etc/shadow$
(Remember that we're on an Ubuntu 17.10 x86_64 system; we often point this out, as the exact output might vary on different distributions, and if kernel security mechanisms, such as SELinux, are installed.)
As highlighted, you can see that ...
