MKPASSWD(1)

💖 MKPASSWD 💖

okay bestie, so this is the mkpasswd(1) page from your Debian GNU/Linux manual, section 1 — and the vibe is: it's an Overfeatured front end to crypt(3). yes, that's literally what the NAME says. it said it, not me. 🙈

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

mkpasswd PASSWORD [SALT]

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the whole deal, and honestly it's giving minimal. mkpasswd takes your password and encrypts it using the crypt(3) libc function — with the salt you hand it. that's it. that's the job. 💅

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

this is where the "overfeatured" part comes in, and I mean... the man page said it first:

• -S STRING, --salt=STRING — use STRING as the salt. but listen, if that string starts with $, it gets yeeted straight to crypt(3) with zero checks. no screening, no vibes check, just straight through. 🫶
• -R NUMBER, --rounds=NUMBER — use NUMBER rounds. now, this argument gets ignored if the method you picked doesn't do variable rounds — so don't get attached. for the OpenBSD Blowfish method, this number is the logarithm of the number of rounds. and btw, the behavior is undefined if you use this without --method. undefined bestie. not a joke. 😭
• -m TYPE, --method=TYPE — compute the password with the TYPE method. if TYPE is help, you get the whole list of available methods printed out — cute, a menu. and if TYPE begins and ends with $ characters, then the string is passed to crypt_gensalt(3) as-is. 💫
• -5 — literally just like saying --method=md5crypt. a lil shortcut. iconic. ⭐
• -P NUM, --password-fd=NUM — read the password from file descriptor NUM instead of using getpass(3). and here's the tea: if that file descriptor is not connected to a tty, then nothing but the hashed password gets printed on stdout. clean output, no extra chatter. 🤫
• -s, --stdin — exactly like --password-fd=0. same energy, shorter to type. ✨

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🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

• MKPASSWD_OPTIONS — a list of options that gets evaluated before the ones you type on the command line. so yeah, it goes first. 👑

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💀 BUGS 💀

okay we have to be honest here, this is the part where we hold hands:

if you use the --stdin option, then passwords containing some control characters may not be read correctly. so like... be careful. 🥲

and also, and I quote: this program suffers of a bad case of featuritis. the man page said it. the man page is not wrong. not me being shady, I'm just the messenger. 🍓

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🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

go read these, they're the extended universe:

passwd(1), passwd(5), crypt(3), crypt(5), crypt_gensalt(3), getpass(3).

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

mkpasswd and this man page were written by Marco d'Itri <md@linux.it>, and they're licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. slay, honestly. 💜

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and that's a wrap, bestie!! 🎀 this page was brought to you by Marco d'Itri, dated 2019-12-30, from the MKPASSWD(1) manual page — go forth and hash responsibly, mwah 💅✨