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chfn(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | CONFIGURATION | FILES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON 

CHFN(1)                       User Commands                       CHFN(1)

NAME         top

       chfn - change full user name and information

SYNOPSIS         top


       chfn [options] [LOGIN]

DESCRIPTION         top

       The chfn command changes the user's full name, office room number,
       office phone number, and home phone number information for an
       account in the respective fields of /etc/passwd. This information
       is typically printed by finger(1) and similar programs. A normal
       user may only change the fields for her own account, subject to
       the restrictions in /etc/login.defs. (The default configuration is
       to prevent users from changing their fullname.) The superuser may
       change any field for any account. Additionally, only the superuser
       may use the -o option to change the undefined portions of the
       GECOS field.

       These fields must not contain any colons. Except for the other
       field, they should not contain any comma or equal sign. It is also
       recommended to avoid non-US-ASCII characters, but this is only
       enforced for the phone numbers. The other field is used to store
       accounting information used by other applications.

       If LOGIN is not specified, chfn acts on the current user, and
       prompts for the current user's password.

OPTIONS         top

       The options which apply to the chfn command are:

       -f, --full-name FULL_NAME
           Change the user's full name.

       -h, --home-phone HOME_PHONE
           Change the user's home phone number.

       -o, --other OTHER
           Change the user's other GECOS information. This field is used
           to store accounting information used by other applications,
           and can be changed only by a superuser.

       -r, --room ROOM_NUMBER
           Change the user's room number.

       -R, --root CHROOT_DIR
           Apply changes in the CHROOT_DIR directory and use the
           configuration files from the CHROOT_DIR directory. No SELINUX
           support.

       -u, --help
           Display help message and exit.

       -w, --work-phone WORK_PHONE
           Change the user's office phone number.

       If none of the options is selected, chfn operates in an
       interactive fashion, prompting the user with the current values
       for all of the fields. Enter the new value to change the field, or
       leave the line blank to use the current value. The current value
       is displayed between a pair of
        [] marks.

CONFIGURATION         top

       The following configuration variables in /etc/login.defs change
       the behavior of this tool:

       CHFN_RESTRICT (string)
           This parameter specifies which values in the gecos field of
           the /etc/passwd file may be changed by regular users using the
           chfn program. It can be any combination of letters f, r, w, h,
           for Full name, Room number, Work phone, and Home phone,
           respectively. For backward compatibility, yes is equivalent to
           rwh and no is equivalent to frwh. If not specified, only the
           superuser can make any changes. The most restrictive setting
           is better achieved by not installing chfn SUID.

FILES         top

       /etc/login.defs
           Shadow password suite configuration.

       /etc/passwd
           User account information.

SEE ALSO         top

       chsh(1), login.defs(5), passwd(5).

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the shadow-utils (utilities for managing
       accounts and shadow password files) project.  Information about
       the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, send it to
       pkg-shadow-devel@alioth-lists.debian.net.  This page was obtained
       from the tarball shadow-4.19.0.tar fetched from
       ⟨https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/releases⟩ on 2026-05-24.
       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

shadow-utils 4.19.0             05/24/2026                        CHFN(1)

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