easy way to create a random password

January 10, 2007 · Posted in General, Linux, freebsd, security

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Sometimes you just need a quick way to create a random password without installing special random password generators.

Here is an easy way to create a random password using standard tools that are available on most of the unix flavours:

head -c 10 /dev/random | base64

or if you don't have the base64 program but you have uuencode

head -c 10 /dev/random | uuencode -m -

This will create a password based on a 10 bytes long random sequence.

If you want longer or shorter passwords just replace "-c 10" with "-c x", where x is the number of random bytes you want to use.

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