faillock 8 Linux-PAM Manual faillock Tool for displaying and modifying the authentication failure record files faillock --dir /path/to/tally-directory --user username --reset The pam_faillock.so module maintains a list of failed authentication attempts per user during a specified interval and locks the account in case there were more than deny consecutive failed authentications. It stores the failure records into per-user files in the tally directory. The faillock command is an application which can be used to examine and modify the contents of the tally files. It can display the recent failed authentication attempts of the username or clear the tally files of all or individual usernames. --dir /path/to/tally-directory The directory where the user files with the failure records are kept. The default is /var/run/faillock. --user username The user whose failure records should be displayed or cleared. --reset Instead of displaying the user's failure records, clear them. /var/run/faillock/* the files logging the authentication failures for users pam_faillock8 , pam8 faillock was written by Tomas Mraz.