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Generating a random password

A tool that I wrote last year to generate random passwords, and have since found unbelievably useful. Save it in a shell script and use at will. It takes one optional parameter, which is the password length (it defaults to 12 chars), and produces a typable password without problematic characters (such as quotes) that some badly-configured websites choke on.

#!/bin/bash
if [[ -n $1 ]]; then 
  len=$1 
else 
  len=12 
fi 
< /dev/urandom tr -dc \
  _\!\@\#\$\%\^\&\*\(\)\<\>,.:\;+\-=\[\]\\/\?\|\~A-Za-z0-9 \
  | head -c$len 
echo

BarCampGalway

BarCampGalway was great. An interesting and eclectic collection of talks and a serious dose of geek craic in the Westwood afterwards. Talks I attended at least some of included:

  • Moving between Windows and Ubuntu by James Cooley
  • Django for WebApp development by Kevin Noonan
  • Machine Learning by Aidan Finn
  • Microsoft Silverlight by Martha Rotter (cross-platform? Really?)
  • Gamepad driven text editing by John Sturdy (so what’s Emacs?)
  • Perl lightning talks by Tim Bunce (apologies for typing furiously during it, but I was listening)
  • Drupal by Vincent Jordon
  • Demystifying Internet Marketing by Alastair McDermott

All good clean fun. Thanks to John, Aidan and Conor for organising.