On 04/10/2017 09:46, Richard Melville wrote:
To save me time investigating both versions of mkpasswd I wondered if
anybody had any information to hand as to the key differences between
the two.
mkpasswd from expect is a tcl program, whose algorithm is described in
Chapter 23 of the O'Reilly book "Exploring Expect", that
generates a random password, and optionally assign it to a user.
mkpasswd from whois does not truly generates a password: it encrypts a
given password into a key. That key can be generated from a password
typed by a user and compared to a database (such as /etc/passwd, or its
shadow). Note that the result is always the same for a given input.
There is also a "makepasswd" program in debian ftp, which combines both,
and also a pwgen program (on sourceforge), which generates
"pronounceable" (or "easily memorable") passwords.
Pierre
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