spass is a secure password generation tool. spass was designed under the assumption that a password generator is only 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 straightforward: 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 it does so through 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 an 8-character-long alphanumeric-only password. There are flags for numbers only, lowercase, uppercase, hexadecimal, and an 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 amounts of passwords, one may want to call spass with the -f flag to instruct it to use /dev/urandom. Using /dev/urandom results in lower-quality random numbers, but much faster password generation for large numbers of passwords.
There are more features in spass; run spass --help to see a full list of features.
One thought on “
spass– A Secure Password Generator Utility”