If there’s any chance you need to verify a user’s password on the command line and you are root you can use openssl with the info from /etc/shadow.

So first we want to grab the entry from /etc/shadow

cat /etc/shadow | grep mike

That will give us something that looks like

mike:$6$tCFXiZHH$tFN8HZg/hXxYePSLZHVyBWuCFKlyesvKGKefwef2qR.DEKrrkvDUhewfwefuM.kU1HewfwE3HvprG/oMnizG2.:15734:0:99999:7:::

So the items we want are the $6 and the $tCFXiZHH. The $6 is important because that tells us the password is using sha512 for encryption. And the $tCFXiZHH is the salt.

So now we can run

mkpasswd -m sha-512 somePasswordHere tCFXiZHH

The output should match up with what’s above and if it is.. you have a valid password.

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