spass
is a secure password generation tool. spass
was designed under the assumption that a password generator is as good as its random number generator, so spass
uses the Random
class, a /dev/random
based cryptographically strong random number generator class. As always, I tried to make the command-line interface as user-friendly as possible (as much as a command-line interface can be friendly).
Download
You can download spass
from here.
Install
Installation is pretty straight forward, just untar the archive and run make ; make install
. This will compile spass
and place it under /usr/bin
.
Usage
spass
can do all sorts of password generation, and do it in a user-friendly command line interface.
To create a simple password containing alphanumeric characters and some special symbols, just run spass 10
where 10 specifies the length of the password. You can control the character range from which passwords are created using command line flags. For example spass -a 8
will create 8 character long alphanumeric only password. There are flags for numbers only, lowercase, uppercase, hexadecimal, and extended special symbols set.
You can generate multiple passwords at once. For example spass -N 5 7
will create five 7 character long passwords.
As spass
uses /dev/random
for random number generation, it may block when entropy levels are low. When generating large amount of passwords, one may want to call spass
-f flag, to instruct it to use /dev/urandom
. Using /dev/urandom
results in lower quality of random numbers, but much faster password generation for large amounts of passwords.
There are more features for spass
, run spass --help
to see a full list of features.
One thought on “
spass
– A Secure Password Generator Utility”