nologin

Additional Notes

nologin is a program that displays a message and exits immediately, preventing interactive login for system accounts. It is typically used as the login shell for users who should not have interactive access, such as nobody, www-data, daemon, and other system accounts.

The program prints a predefined message (usually This account is currently not available.) and exits with a non-zero status. This prevents login via SSH, terminal, or console while still allowing the account to own processes and files. It is a security practice to assign nologin or /sbin/nologin to system accounts that do not need human interaction.

Syntax

nologin

Parameters

• No parameters. nologin takes no arguments.

Common Options

• --help: Show help and exit.
• --version: Show version information.

Examples

grep nologin /etc/passwd

Show user accounts that have /sbin/nologin set as their login shell.

sudo usermod -s /sbin/nologin guest

Change the guest account to use nologin, preventing interactive login.

sudo -u nobody /sbin/nologin

Attempt to run nologin as the nobody user. It prints a message and exits.

Practical Notes

• The nologin binary is usually located at /sbin/nologin or /usr/sbin/nologin.
• Some systems use /bin/false instead of nologin. nologin prints a message; /bin/false exits silently.
• Assigning nologin to system accounts does not prevent sudo, cron, or other non-login process execution.
• To create a new system user with nologin, use useradd -r -s /sbin/nologin username.
• The message printed by nologin can be customized through the /etc/nologin.txt file in some implementations.