Mark Fickett Art: mkpasswd

Main

Generate a random password with some parameters. Developed on MacOS X, but theoretically platform-independant. Download mkpasswd-2009Dec19.tar.gz or mkpasswd.py.

Example usage ($ is the command prompt):

$ mkpasswd.py
?!_:cuMW
$ mkpasswd.py -n 10 -u 1 -l 1 -d 2 -p 0
7uBm9H6NQm
$ mkpasswd.py -n 6 -e \"\| -d .2 -p .2
LwVa+b
$ mkpasswd.py --help
Usage: mkpasswd.py [options]

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -n NUMCHARS, --numchars=NUMCHARS
                        number of characters in the desired password
  -e EXCLUDESTRING, --exclude=EXCLUDESTRING
                        exclude characters found in EXCLUDESTRING
  -l LOWER, --lowercase-weight=LOWER
                        relative weighting for characters in the lowercase set
  -u UPPER, --uppercase-weight=UPPER
                        relative weighting for characters in the uppercase set
  -d DIGIT, --digit-weight=DIGIT
                        relative weighting for characters in the digit set
  -p PUNCT, --punctuation-weight=PUNCT
                        relative weighting for characters in the punctuation
                        set

I use this (frequently) to generate random passwords for sites I only expect to log in to once (or, once every six months).

I have, in my .profile:

alias mkpasswd='/path/to/mkpasswd.py -p .5'

Weighting is relative to a category's default, as opposed to relative to other categories. For example, there are 26 lowercase letters, and 36 punctuation characters, so default weighting produces more punctuation than lowercase letters. By contrast, mkpasswd.py -p .5 makes it as though there were only 16 punctuation characters, so punctuation is roughly two-thirds as likely as lowercase letters.

Invented independently from, but very similar to, NIST's / Don Libes' mkpasswd.

Up for licensing.