Coredump
Work, play, and everything in-between 

Generate random strings

Posted in Play on 16 January 2010 | Comments?
Tags: cli, linux, scripting, tips

(Another “piecemeal” post. Yes, I know: I should write more often.)

I cycle through one-off passwords (of varying lengths). To generate these, I use the following shell script:

#!/bin/bash
 
usage() {
  echo "Usage: `basename $0` [length]"
}
 
[ $# -gt 1 ] && usage && exit 65
 
[ $# -eq 0 ] && len=8 || len=$1
 
strings /dev/urandom | grep -o '[[:alnum:]]' | head -n $len | tr -d '\n'; echo

To use:

$ ./genrand.sh 16
tFJNxyZk4EYaJiuz

And, no, that’s not my password. Or is it?

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