» Generate a moderately secure random password

Just to remind myself... ;)

cat /dev/urandom \
| base64 \
| tr -d '[^:alnum:]' \
| cut -c1-10 \
| head -1

The command chain above does the following:

• dd if=/dev/urandom: read random data from /dev/urandom and write it to STDOUT
• base64: encode that binary data into Base64 to make it human-readable
• tr -d '[^:alnum:]': remove all characters that are not alphanumeric (i.e. remove whitespaces, +, ...)
• cut -c1-10: only keep characters 1 to 10 from each line
• head -1: only keep the first line

Better randomness may be achieved by doing a cat on /dev/random instead of /dev/urandom, if you have enough entropy (see cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail) Obviously, if you prefer passwords of a different length, e.g. 16, change the cut -c1-10 accordingly: cut -c1-16