Symbol characters for passwords

Various means of getting symbol characters (non-alphanumerics such as !) into an array for random password generation.

# the manual way, hunting over the keyboard, and worrying about
# possibly escaping certain specials (truncated example)
@s = qw(! @ # $ % ^ & *);

# investigation of the ASCII table shows the special characters are
# in chunks, which we can convert into the real characters using map
@s = map { chr } 33..47,58..64,91..96,123..126;

# this can also be done without knowing where the special characters
# are with a grep for printable non-alphanumeric non-whitespace chars
@s = grep { /[[:print:]]/ and /[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/ } map { chr } 1..128;
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Re: Symbol characters for passwords by dakkar (Hermit) on Dec 23, 2002 at 10:14 UTC
To generate new root passwords, we did: `#!/usr/bin/perl -w use MIME::Base64; open RND,'<','/dev/urandom'; sysread RND,$rnd,1024; close RND; print encode_base64($rnd);` [download] And then we hunted into the result for something we would be able to remember. Note: this supposes you are on a system that has `/dev/urandom`. Substitute it with any reasonable random-stream generator. -- dakkar - Mobilis in mobile	[reply] [d/l]

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Re: Symbol characters for passwords
by dakkar (Hermit) on Dec 23, 2002 at 10:14 UTC

To generate new root passwords, we did:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use MIME::Base64;

open RND,'<','/dev/urandom';
sysread RND,$rnd,1024;
close RND;
print encode_base64($rnd);
[download]

And then we hunted into the result for something we would be able to remember.

Note: this supposes you are on a system that has /dev/urandom. Substitute it with any reasonable random-stream generator.

-- 
        dakkar - Mobilis in mobile

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