# Recover Lost Passwords on Mac OSX

28 June 2004 · Ray Slakinski

If you have a Mac and can't recall your password, Mount the drive as a firewire drive and from the terminal of the other computer type

> strings -8 /Volumes/MyOtherComputer/var/vm/swapfile0 |grep -A 4 -i longname

And you may just get your password shown back to you in plain text. This works in 10.3.4 and below. As [Jason](http://jason.sdf1.net) has found out, if you have lots of ram, you don't get a swapfile, therefor your passwords are not saved in plain text.

Of course there are less friendly uses for the above command, but I'll leave that up to you to figure out :p