Are passwords on modern Unix/Linux systems still limited to 8 characters?

Question

Years ago it used to be the case that Unix passwords were limited to 8 characters, or that if you made the password longer than 8 characters the extra wouldn\'t make any differe

Answer 1

Are you asking about the crypt algorithm?

http://linux.die.net/man/3/crypt

"By taking the lowest 7 bits of each of the first eight characters of the key..."

"The glibc2 version of this function has the following additional features. ... The entire key is significant here (instead of only the first 8 bytes)."

Here's a hint as to how long ago this change happened.

Glibc 2 HOWTO
  Eric Green, ejg3@cornell.edu
  v1.6, 22 June 1998