MySQL – How to Check if User’s Password Has Expired

Any way you do this, you're probably going to have a password saved somewhere. Even MySQL 5.6 login-path is easily decryptable by anyone with the motivation. That warning said, this would be an easy solution.

In your environment script (eg ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc), set

alias mysql='mysql -uUser -pPasswd -hHostname'

(putting in your desired User, Passwd, and Hostname, of course.)

After shell relogin, you should be able to simply do

mysql

... which will use your alias and connect to the DB and ignore any passwords in .my.cnf files.

Security note: If there are other users on your server, you might want to chmod 700 your profile script so the password is not as easily accessed by others. Any admin with root or sudo will be able to see it still; no way around that.

According to MySQL documentation, in order to change a password of a user, bmcrae must have UPDATE privilege for the mysql database.

To check the privileges of the user bmcrae, run the following command:

show grants for 'bmcrae'@'hostname';

OR

Show grants for bmcrae;

And check whether, the user bmcrae has UPDATE privilege on mysql database.

If the bmcrae doesn't have that privileges, grant update privilege to bmcrae user.

Login as a root user and run the following statement to grant update statement to bmcrae user.

grant update on mysql.* to 'bmcrae'@'hostname';

Warning: If you grant update privileges on mysql database, the bmcrae user can update all tables of mysql database.