password-generator

Yet another xkcd-style password generator.

Word list is taken from hermitdave/FrequencyWords.

Usage

Note: At the moment all sample commands below assume you are executing from the base directory of a clone of this repository.

generate.sh

This is just a wrapper around shuf. Given input on stdin, it outputs 5 lines at random. Repeats are allowed.

$ cat word_list.txt | ./generate.sh
touch
farmers
costs
armies
caused

It optionally takes a count as an argument, to specify the number of lines to output

$ cat word_list.txt | ./generate.sh 10
execution
flour
extended
forbidden
foundation
muscles
benefits
cake
worst
fuel

generate.sh requires shuf or gshuf on your system. On OS X, you can get gshuf as part of the coreutils package, through Homebrew.

brew install coreutils

make

Alternately, I provide a set of convenience targets for make:

$ make password   # or just `make`. The default target invokes `password`.
pot
wax
steam
hurt
cape

Again, the default length is 5, but can be adjusted

$ PICK=3 make password
flowing
magazine
grandson

Here you can also adjust the size of the word list we generate from by specifying POOL. This defaults to 8192, which I've chosen because it seems a nice balance between memorability and password length. Being a power of 2, it also simplifies back of the envelope estimates of password entropy.

$ POOL=20 PICK=10 make password
we
and
have
of
it
that
the
what
to
to

There are additional targets for longer outputs or space-separated outputs.

$ make long_password
greece
mia
purchase
normal
interest
cab
rig
relationships
ross
corridor

$ make flat_password
injury aim assigned naive deserved

The Makefile also contains targets for rebuilding the word list.

$ make clean word_list

will wipe out the existing copy, and rebuild it from a fresh copy of the English word list in hermitdave/FrequencyWords.