pfSense » pfSense Plus

To reproduce this you must hit ctl+c twice quite rapidly. So it appears to escape the menu before ctl+c is captured.

Spamming ^C is a bad practice in general, but unfortunately common. The script drawing the menu can capture its own signals, but not signals for child processes. If you press ^C multiple times rapidly it will kill other things running to render the menu and could have other impacts, but in this case it appears to be canceling the password check.

This change appears to catch that case and not fall into the password change for me:

diff --git a/src/etc/rc.initial b/src/etc/rc.initial
index ed2cbab19a..cd88fa4c51 100755
--- a/src/etc/rc.initial
+++ b/src/etc/rc.initial
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ case "$(/usr/bin/head -1 /etc/default-config-flavor | /usr/bin/tr -d '[:space:]'
 esac

 # If the password check fails, print an error and prompt to change it.
-if [ ${PWCHECK} -ne 0 ]; then
+if [ ${PWCHECK} -ne 0 ] && [ -n "${PWCHECK_TEXT}" ]; then
        echo "*** *** *** *** *** ***" 
        echo ${PWCHECK_TEXT}
        echo "Password MUST be changed." 

Fixed in Plus commit 72e0fb9b7910195ad402e72480728fce8ef0867b

Tested on

26.07-DEVELOPMENT (amd64)
built on Wed Apr 8 17:33:00 UTC 2026
FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT

This is no longer an issue. Marking resolved.