Generating Random Password

Source: http://www.linuxstall.com/command-line-password-generator/

The random source in many UNIX system is /dev/random and /dev/urandom, but that’s a binary random source. To convert it into something usable as password, we can use tr:

tr -dc '!-z' < /dev/urandom | fold -w10 | head -1

The fold command folds the character stream into fixed line width. Similar use would be head -w10 but it would not give you the new line at the end. Maybe use [:alnum:] is a better choice if password shall not contain any punctuation.

Other methods include:

• Base64 encoding of something:
  dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1 count=32 2>/dev/null | base64 -w 0 | rev | cut -b 2- | rev
• Base64 of the md5sum/sha256sum of something:
  date +%s | sha256sum | base64 | head -c 32 ; echo
• Using OpenSSL’s random generator:
  openssl rand -base64 32