Port of the week: pwgen

I 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