What is Panther's password length ?

michaelsanford

michaelsanford

Translator, Web Developer
I seem to remember someone telling me (ksv, ElDiablo?) a while ago that Mac OS X only stored passwords less than or equal to 8 characters (i.e., truncated at 9th character).

RedHat has had support for 256 character passwords for I don't know how long. Was that Jaguar that only supported short passwords, or does Panther also have this limitation ?

It's an obviously important thing to consider when choosing a password...
 
OS X up to 10.2 (or was it just 10.1?) would truncate at 8 characters. If you upgrade 10.2 to 10.3 and keep accounts, the passwords will remain truncated at 8 chars, until they are next changed; then the full length will be kept. (unless you set a stupendously long passphrase, presumably)

I'm not sure of the new length, but 256 sounds reasonable
 
PASSWD(1) BSD General Commands Manual PASSWD(1)

NAME
passwd - modify a user's password

SYNOPSIS
passwd [-i infosystem] [-l location] [name]

DESCRIPTION
Passwd changes the user's password. First, the user is prompted for
their current password. If the current password is correctly typed, a
new password is requested. The new password must be entered twice to
avoid typing errors.

The new password should be at least six characters long and not purely
alphabetic. Its total length should be less than _PASSWORD_LEN (cur-
rently 128 characters) although some infosystems allow longer passwords.
Numbers, upper case letters and meta characters are encouraged.
 
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