Terminal password not same as administrative password?

Mark1411 wrote:

• Randall,

Thanks very much for writing. I've tried to use the same password I use to sign into the computer for a sudo command within Terminal. For whatever reason it doesn't seem to work.

Double check that the Caps Lock key is not on.

Try booting into Safe Mode to see if you have the same issue. This may help if you are running a third party app which interferes with the normal operation of macOS, although they could have modified the system configuration preference file so Safe Mode may not help.

Try creating a new admin macOS user account. Log out of your main user account, then log into the new admin user account. Do you have the same issue with Terminal?

Check the System Settings to see if any "Profiles" are listed which may be exercising control & restricting aspects of macOS. Typically this will be from the Mac being managed by a school or business.

Try using another keyboard in case of an intermittent key failure...any standard keyboard should work.

One other strange thing: in Recovery mode, when I try to reset my admin password within Terminal, my main account doesn't show up in the Password Reset window, only a Test account. I wonder what would cause this.

While I have not seen this specifically since I never tried to reset a user account password, I have seen something similar on 2018-2020 Intel Macs when trying to authenticate when booting into recovery mode....I haven't seen it with an Apple Silicon Mac yet, but I haven't worked with a lot of them yet. In the case of the 2018-2020 Intel Macs, it appeared to be a bug/issue with the T2 security chip. One one Mac, I could log into every macOS admin account on the laptop without issue, but I could not authenticate when booting into recovery mode....some users were not visible, others may be listed only by their UUID. In fact I deleted an admin account from within macOS and was finally able to authenticate in recovery mode, but I had to use the information from the admin user account I had previously deleted. Sounds like it may be something similar. I ended up performing a clean install of macOS followed by restoring from a backup even though I had no issues within macOS itself (I did not trust the system in that state since something was obviously wrong).

You may want to check if you can authenticate in recovery mode once you create a new admin user account.

If you can log into macOS, you should be able to change your user account password in the "User & Groups" System Settings. If you have trouble here, then it would appear the issue affects more than just the Terminal app.

Do you by any chance have Filevault enabled? Not sure where exactly you are having issues authenticating in recovery mode.

Are you trying to use the login for Administrator within Terminal, or are you using Sudo for commands that require a password? Sudo will only use whatever the password is you enter to login to the computer. EG Are you trying to change the user to Administrator within Terminal?