GPW(1)

💖 GPW 💖

okay bestie, so this is the manual page for gpw from the General Commands Manual — a program that generates pronounceable passwords and honestly? she ate. ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

gpw — the program that generates pronounceable passwords 🎀

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

gpw [number_of_passwords [length_of_passwords]]

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So like, this manual page documents the gpw command briefly — and the tea is that it was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution because the original program literally does not have a manual page. Not me writing the docs nobody else wrote 💅

Gpw is a program that generates pronounceable passwords of whatever length is desired. However long you want, she's got you 🫶 It does this using the statistics of three-letter combinations (trigraphs) of the english system dictionary. Lowkey iconic.

It's based on the ideas in Morrie Gasser's password generator for Multics, and Dan Edwards's generator for CTSS. And FIPS Standard 181 describes a similar digraph-based generator, derived from Gasser's. Lineage? Immaculate. 👑

💅 OPTIONS 💅

This program accepts two optional numbers as command-line arguments, fr fr:

• the first value — the number of password to generate
• the second one — the length of the passwords required, up to 99

Defaults are 10 and 8 respectively. So if you just run her with nothing, you get 10 passwords of 8 characters. Slay. ⭐

⚠️ NOTE ⚠️

Password length should be chosen consistently with the encryption standard used. Bestie, this one matters!!

So, a value of eight is useful with DES encryption, and a longer value should be used with MD5 encryption. Match the length to your encryption or it's giving ✨insecure✨ 😭

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• passwd(1)
• pwgen(1)

👑 AUTHOR 👑

This program has been written by Tom Van Vleck <thvv@multicians.org> in 1994. A legend, genuinely. 🎀

🍓 CREDITS 🍓

Based on the ideas in Morrie Gasser's password generator for Multics, and Dan Edwards's generator for CTSS. FIPS Standard 181 describes a similar digraph-based generator, derived from Gasser's. (yes this part is a repeat, she's just giving credit where credit is due, okay?? 💖)

This manual page was written by Francesco P. Lovergine <frankie@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others), who also modified and packaged sources to port it under GNU/Linux. Real MVP behavior. 🫶

and that's the whole page bestie!! 🦋 this version is from Aug 24, 2001, it's page GPW(1) from the General Commands Manual — go make some pronounceable passwords, ily, mwah 💜🌸