There are times when I’ve been focusing on programming all day, and it is easier to write a program to do something trivial, then it is to just do it the simple way. Today was such a day. Instead of typing some random character to make up new user’s password, I wrote a script to do it for me:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#################################################################
## Quick Random Password Generator
## Author: Brandon Checketts
## https://www.brandonchecketts.com/
#################################################################

my $length = $ARGV[0] || 10;

my $charset = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890";

my $pw = "";
for (my $i=0; $i < $length; $i++) {
    my $pos = rand(length($charset));
    $pw .= substr($charset, $pos, 1);
}
print "\\nRandom Password: $pw\\n\\n";

Of course you can modify the default length and/or characters to make something more suitable for your use.

Sample Usage:

[root@dev ~]# ~/bin/pwgen

Random Password: mYTZrSpE8B

[root@dev ~]# ~/bin/pwgen 20

Random Password: EoSQpypmeK3SZCVPodaM