Port of the week: pwgen

• Author: Solène
• Date: 12 August 2016
• Tags: security portoftheweek

NILI will talk about security/pwgen for the current port of the

week. It's a very light executable to generate passwords. But it's not

just a dumb password generator, it has options to choose what kind of

password you want.

Here is a list of options with their flag, you will find a lot more in

the nice man page of pwgen:

• -A : don't use capital letters

• -B : don't use characters which could be missread (O/0, I/l/1 ...)

• -v : don't use vowels

• etc...

You can also use a seed to generate your "random" password (which

aren't very random in this case), you may need it for some reason to

be able to reproduce password you lost for a ftp/http access for

example.

Example of pwgen output generating 5 password of 10 characters. Using

-1 parameter so it will only display one password per line, otherwise

it display a grid (on column and multiple lines) of passwords.

$ pwgen -1 10 5

fohchah9oP

haNgeik0ee

meiceeW8ae

OReejoi5oo

ohdae2Eisu