Passwords › Password Content › Special Characters in Passwords

Special Characters in Passwords

Special characters are defined in the PASSCHAR list. The special characters that can be defined for a password are:

• Ampersand &
• Asterisk *
• At @
• Carat ^
• Colon :
• Dollar $
• Equal sign =
• Exclamation mark !
• Hyphen -
• Percentage sign %
• Period .
• Pound (hash) #
• Question mark ?
• Underscore _
• Vertical line |

These can be defined in character or hexadecimal format.

Important! Evaluate all potential logon applications that support the selection of a new password (for example, TSO and CICS) to insure that they support special characters in the password and new password fields. Applications that edit the password and new password field data prior to invoking the logon request may not support special characters. This may prevent users whose passwords contain special characters from logging on to the application.

To specify that new passwords must have at least one special character, enter the command:

TSS MODIFY NEWPW(SC)

Examples: special characters

This example uses character format to set the special password characters to *, &, and %:

TSS MODIFY PASSCHAR(*,&,%)

This example uses hexadecimal format to set the special characters to &, _, and %.

TSS MODIFY PASSCHAR(50,60,6C)