I was looking for a way to generate some random password in a shell script I was writting and I stumbled across a handy little program: pwgen
According to the pwgen man page:
pwgen generates passwords which are designed to be easily memorized by humans, while being as secure as possible.
The pwgen program is designed to be used both interactively, and in shell scripts. Hence, its default behaviour is(sp) differs depending on whether the standard output is a tty device or a pipe to another program. Used interactively, pwgen will display a screenful of passwords, allowing the user to pick a single password, and then quickly erase the screen. This prevents someone from being able to “shoulder-surf” the user’s chosen password.
So there you have it, a nice quick way to create a password. And just a sample of how I used it in my shell script:
CLEARPASS=$(pwgen -N 1)
This returns one somewhat random password to the shell variable CLEARPASS.
Tomorrow I hope to have a nice write up on how to do password-less authentication via SSH shared keys.
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