Comments on: Linux / UNIX: Generating random password with mkpasswd

By: Aimon Bustardo

Aimon Bustardo — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 03:32:24 +0000

This is wrong (At least for RHEL and CentOS). That will generate an unencrypted password and enter it into the passwd file. Correct command is:

usermod -p `makepasswd –char=20 –crypt-md5` username

By: tsolox

tsolox — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 21:19:18 +0000

there is also `pwgen`

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:26:18 +0000

Another handy way of generating random passwords is this:

echo `

Obviously, this can be tweaked to your liking by adding symbols to the list of allowed characters and changing the length of the generated password in the head options. You can also use /dev/random if you want proper randomness but that does make it a whole lot slower.



By: Gen2ly
Gen2ly — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:36:10 +0000
To generate a random password for a user, you can do:
usermod -p `mkpasswd –chars=20` username
Also there char should be chars.  Thanks for the tip. 


By: Slavko
Slavko — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 12:27:37 +0000
apt-get install makepasswd