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I just installed macOS Mojave and put in my usual short desktop-only password I've been using for years (yes, you read that right). Now though, the operating system rejects setting a password less than 4 characters. It also does not allow having no password at all.
I am completely comfortable using the shell if need be.
How can I change the password policy to allow quite short passwords?
Optionally, learn a bit of the regular expression language - regex (this may take a while) and you can use the one crafted below for a 4 character length password. Here’s how to retrieve the configuration, edit that file, and then load it into the system:
pwpolicy getaccountpolicies | awk 'NR>1' > ~/Desktop/file.plist
nano ~/Desktop/file.plist
Change the quoted part to your Regex.
policyAttributePassword matches '^$|.{4,}+'
pwpolicy setaccountpolicies ~/Desktop/file.plist
passwd
Presets:
^$|.{1,}+ : Any password. (Not the best Regex, but I didn't want to mess around with it too much.)Confirmed this works with macOS Mojave (10.14).
Source: Modify pwpolicy in Sierra
setaccountpolicies gives an error about wrong format.) See answer from @david-p below for a working solution.
You can also use the much more straightforward command:
pwpolicy -clearaccountpolicies
to remove the 4-character requirement for all users. The man page gives other useful examples if you want to change the policy on a per-user basis.
passwdcommand?passwdoutputspasswd: authentication token failureeach time I attempt to change it to less than 4 characters. It works if I use 4 characters.