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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | CONFIG FILE ITEMS | FILES | BUGS | AUTHORS | SEE ALSO | AVAILABILITY | COLOPHON |
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LOGIN(1) User Commands LOGIN(1)
login - begin session on the system
login [ -p ] [ -h host ] [ -H ] [ -f username | username ]
login is used when signing onto a system. If no argument is
given, login prompts for the username.
The user is then prompted for a password, where appropriate.
Echoing is disabled to prevent revealing the password. Only a
number of password failures are permitted before login exits and
the communications link is severed. See LOGIN_RETRIES in CONFIG
FILE ITEMS section.
If password aging has been enabled for the account, the user may
be prompted for a new password before proceeding. In such case
old password must be provided and the new password entered before
continuing. Please refer to passwd(1) for more information.
The user and group ID will be set according to their values in
the /etc/passwd file. There is one exception if the user ID is
zero. In this case, only the primary group ID of the account is
set. This should allow the system administrator to login even in
case of network problems. The environment variable values for
$HOME, $USER, $SHELL, $PATH, $LOGNAME, and $MAIL are set
according to the appropriate fields in the password entry. $PATH
defaults to /usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin for normal users, and to
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin for
root, if not otherwise configured.
The environment variable $TERM will be preserved, if it exists,
else it will be initialized to the terminal type on your tty.
Other environment variables are preserved if the -p option is
given.
Then the user's shell is started. If no shell is specified for
the user in /etc/passwd, then /bin/sh is used. If there is no
home directory specified in /etc/passwd, then / is used, followed
by .hushlogin check as described below.
If the file .hushlogin exists, then a "quiet" login is performed.
This disables the checking of mail and the printing of the last
login time and message of the day. Otherwise, if /var/log
/lastlog exists, the last login time is printed, and the current
login is recorded.
-p Used by getty(8) to tell login to preserve the
environment.
-f Used to skip a login authentication. This option is
usually used by the getty(8) autologin feature.
-h Used by other servers (such as telnetd(8)) to pass the
name of the remote host to login so that it can be placed
in utmp and wtmp. Only the superuser is allowed use this
option.
Note that the -h option has an impact on the PAM service
name. The standard service name is login, but with the -h
option, the name is remote. It is necessary to create
proper PAM config files (for example, /etc/pam.d/login and
/etc/pam.d/remote).
-H Used by other servers (for example, telnetd(8)) to tell
login that printing the hostname should be suppressed in
the login: prompt. See also LOGIN_PLAIN_PROMPT below.
--help Display help text and exit.
-V, --version
Display version information and exit.
login reads the /etc/login.defs(5) configuration file. Note that
the configuration file could be distributed with another package
(usually shadow-utils). The following configuration items are
relevant for login:
MOTD_FILE (string)
Specifies a ":" delimited list of "message of the day" files
and directories to be displayed upon login. If the specified
path is a directory then displays all files with .motd file
extension in version-sort order from the directory.
The default value is /usr/share/misc/motd:/run/motd:/etc
/motd. If the MOTD_FILE item is empty or a quiet login is
enabled, then the message of the day is not displayed. Note
that the same functionality is also provided by the
pam_motd(8) PAM module.
The directories in the MOTD_FILE are supported since version
2.36.
Note that login does not implement any filenames overriding
behavior like pam_motd (see also MOTD_FIRSTONLY), but all
content from all files is displayed. It is recommended to
keep extra logic in content generators and use /run/motd.d
rather than rely on overriding behavior hardcoded in system
tools.
MOTD_FIRSTONLY (boolean)
Forces login to stop display content specified by MOTD_FILE
after the first accessible item in the list. Note that a
directory is one item in this case. This option allows login
semantics to be configured to be more compatible with
pam_motd. The default value is no.
LOGIN_PLAIN_PROMPT (boolean)
Tell login that printing the hostname should be suppressed in
the login: prompt. This is an alternative to the -H command
line option. The default value is no.
LOGIN_TIMEOUT (number)
Maximum time in seconds for login. The default value is 60.
LOGIN_RETRIES (number)
Maximum number of login retries in case of a bad password.
The default value is 3.
LOGIN_KEEP_USERNAME (boolean)
Tell login to only re-prompt for the password if
authentication failed, but the username is valid. The
default value is no.
FAIL_DELAY (number)
Delay in seconds before being allowed another three tries
after a login failure. The default value is 5.
TTYPERM (string)
The terminal permissions. The default value is 0600 or 0620
if tty group is used.
TTYGROUP (string)
The login tty will be owned by the TTYGROUP. The default
value is tty. If the TTYGROUP does not exist, then the
ownership of the terminal is set to the user´s primary group.
The TTYGROUP can be either the name of a group or a numeric
group identifier.
HUSHLOGIN_FILE (string)
If defined, this file can inhibit all the usual chatter
during the login sequence. If a full pathname (for example,
/etc/hushlogins) is specified, then hushed mode will be
enabled if the user´s name or shell are found in the file.
If this global hush login file is empty then the hushed mode
will be enabled for all users.
If a full pathname is not specified, then hushed mode will be
enabled if the file exists in the user´s home directory.
The default is to check /etc/hushlogins and if it does not
exist then ~/.hushlogin
If the HUSHLOGIN_FILE item is empty, then all the checks are
disabled.
DEFAULT_HOME (boolean)
Indicate if login is allowed if we cannot change directory to
the home directory. If set to yes, the user will login in
the root (/) directory if it is not possible to change
directory to their home. The default value is yes.
LASTLOG_UID_MAX (unsigned number)
Highest user ID number for which the lastlog entries should
be updated. As higher user IDs are usually tracked by remote
user identity and authentication services there is no need to
create a huge sparse lastlog file for them. No
LASTLOG_UID_MAX option present in the configuration means
that there is no user ID limit for writing lastlog entries.
The default value is ULONG_MAX.
LOG_UNKFAIL_ENAB (boolean)
Enable display of unknown usernames when login failures are
recorded. The default value is no.
Note that logging unknown usernames may be a security issue
if a user enters their password instead of their login name.
ENV_PATH (string)
If set, it will be used to define the PATH environment
variable when a regular user logs in. The default value is
/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin
ENV_ROOTPATH (string)
ENV_SUPATH (string)
If set, it will be used to define the PATH environment
variable when the superuser logs in. ENV_ROOTPATH takes
precedence. The default value is /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local
/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
/var/run/utmp
/var/log/wtmp
/var/log/lastlog
/var/spool/mail/*
/etc/motd
/etc/passwd
/etc/nologin
/etc/pam.d/login
/etc/pam.d/remote
/etc/hushlogins
$HOME/.hushlogin
The undocumented BSD -r option is not supported. This may be
required by some rlogind(8) programs.
A recursive login, as used to be possible in the good old days,
no longer works; for most purposes su(1) is a satisfactory
substitute. Indeed, for security reasons, login does a
vhangup(2) system call to remove any possible listening processes
on the tty. This is to avoid password sniffing. If one uses the
command login, then the surrounding shell gets killed by
vhangup(2) because it's no longer the true owner of the tty.
This can be avoided by using exec login in a top-level shell or
xterm.
Derived from BSD login 5.40 (5/9/89) by Michael Glad ⟨glad@daimi.
dk⟩ for HP-UX
Ported to Linux 0.12: Peter Orbaek ⟨poe@daimi.aau.dk⟩
Rewritten to a PAM-only version by Karel Zak ⟨kzak@redhat.com⟩
mail(1), passwd(1), passwd(5), utmp(5), environ(7), getty(8),
init(8), lastlog(8) shutdown(8)
The login command is part of the util-linux package and is
available from Linux Kernel Archive
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩.
This page is part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux
utilities) project. Information about the project can be found
at ⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you
have a bug report for this manual page, send it to
util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
2020-12-18. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
that was found in the repository was 2020-12-17.) 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
util-linux November 2020 LOGIN(1)
Pages that refer to this page: ac(1), bash(1), chsh(1), intro(1), last(1@@util-linux), mesg(1), newgrp(1), newgrp(1@@util-linux), openvt(1), sg(1), su(1@@shadow-utils), ul(1), crypt(3), pam(3), ttyslot(3), group(5), login.defs(5), motd(5), nologin(5), passwd(5), passwd(5@@shadow-utils), proc(5), securetty(5), shadow(5), systemd.exec(5), utmp(5), environ(7), agetty(8), faillog(8), nologin(8), nologin(8@@shadow-utils), PAM(8)
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