[GTALUG] Recommended Linux Password Lengths

Stewart C. Russell scruss at gmail.com
Thu Jun 2 13:04:15 EDT 2016


On 2016-06-02 12:13 PM, Alvin Starr wrote:
> A lot of years ago Jan Carlson wrote a userfriendly password generator.

Yes, that does look like Perl 4 from sometime last century.

If you have to make a password to meet the stupid 8 char requirement you
still sometimes see, this (nabbed from cmdlinefu, IIRC) works:

dd if=/dev/urandom count=1 2>/dev/null | base64 | head -1 | cut -c4-11

They're pretty hostile passwords it makes. I mostly use it to make new,
instantly-forgotten Amazon/Ebay/$GamingSite passwords for the many, many
people who mistakenly think their email address is my gmail address.

 Stewart


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