Generating random characters in console; Ctrl + C doesn't stop the command

[THX11384EB]

I'm trying to generate some random characters for a thing and I'm using console commands I found on the Internet. I've encountered a behaviour that was unexpected and I wanted to find out whether it was a bug.

If I use the command:

Code: Select all

</dev/urandom tr -dc A-Za-z0-9\!£%$ | head -c 26 ; echo

then I get 26 characters as expected. If I use the following command then the random characters just keep scrolling past and pressing Ctrl + C does not stop the mayhem.

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</dev/urandom tr -dc A-Za-z0-9\!£%$^&*~#:;? | head -c 26 ; echo

Why does this happen?

I'm using Antix 17.04.

[BitJam]

That code is horrid in a number of ways. Please try this instead:

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dd if=/dev/urandom bs=13 count=1 status=none | od -An -x | tr -d " \n"

It will give you a string of 26 random hex characters.

[THX11384EB]

Thanks. How do I get it to include special characters?

[THX11384EB]

Can anyone advise me on how to get this command to include special characters (e.g. £, $, %, ^, &, *, [, @, # etc)?

If possible, I'd like five rows of 26 random characters including special characters but I can also just manually arrange them into five rows of 26. Thanks.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Code: Select all

pwgen -sy -1 26 5

[THX11384EB]

Thanks but the pwgen command is not recognised.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Code: Select all

sudo apt install pwgen

[ChrisUK]

Not what you asked, but:

There's many different ways of generating passwords in the Terminal, but one that doesn't (IMO) get enough of a mention is Diceware... gives you easy(ish) to remember (and strong?) passwords without meaningless characters.

EDIT: oops... wrong url

Here's the correct one.