Random Password Generation in a Perl One-Liner

published on Wed, 09/16/2009 - 11:43

Say you need a quick random 8 character alpha-numeric password. In sh, there isn't a $RANDOM variable and tr can give different results on different OS's. More than likely you have perl available - use it!

perl -le 'print map { (a..z,A..Z,0..9)[rand 62] } 0..pop' 8

Thanks to Chris Angell's Perl One-Liner page for this one. Do you have a better cross-platform way of doing it? Let me know!

Comments

Submitted by Paul (not verified) on Thu, 09/17/2009 - 08:07

$ openssl rand 6 -base64
VcT0eiM3

This is quick-and-dirty. Using -base64 to get a printable 8 character output means you're only using 6 bytes of random data, but it works anywhere you've got OpenSSL.

Submitted by suplementy (not verified) on Wed, 10/07/2009 - 05:43

Hi. I like your blog. well done!

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