PASS-GENPHRASE(1)

📦 version 0.3, in nixos 26.05, nixpkgs unstable

💖 PASS-GENPHRASE 💖

okay so bestie, the manual name on this one is PASS-GENPHRASE(1) — it lives in the PASS EXTENSION COMMANDS section, and it's about to become your new favorite thing, no cap.

✨ NAME ✨

pass-genphrase — it's a passphrase generator extension for pass(1). literally that's the whole job and it slays at it 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

pass genphrase [ options ] pass-name [ word-count ]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So pass-genphrase is an extension for pass(1) that gives you the pass genphrase command — which securely creates memorable passphrases using a Diceware[™]-compatible dictionary file. It's a drop-in replacement for the pass generate command, which is giving "glow up but functionally identical" and honestly? iconic. 👑

By default, the dictionary file is the EFF Long Word List created by Joseph Bonneau / The Electronic Frontier Foundation, based on linguistic studies of the English language. (the original links to it at https://www.eff.org/files/2016/07/18/eff_large_wordlist.txt — go look, it's a whole vibe 💜)

But you're not locked in, babes — you can also specify an alternative dictionary using the -d/--dict option. customization is the moment. ✨

💅 OPTIONS AND ARGUMENTS 💅

The options closely follow those of pass generate. Listing them all out for you, in order, because we do NOT skip details in this house:

  • -h, --help — displays help and dips out. exit stage left 🚪
  • -c, --clip — writes the generated passphrase to the clipboard, which pass(1) will later erase automatically. it cleans up after itself, we love a responsible icon 💖
  • -f, --force — replaces an existing password entry with zero prompting. no questions, just vibes 🔥
  • -i, --in-place — generates non-interactively. it only replaces the first line of the stored password file with the newly generated passphrase. super useful for non-interactively editing a multi-line password file. surgical precision, honestly 💅
  • -q, --qrcode — encodes the generated passphrase as a QR code using qrencode(1) without echoing the text to the terminal. see pass(1) for more info about using QR codes. stealth mode activated 🥷
  • *-d *path, --dict=path — specifies the path to a dictionary file. (this one's specific to pass genphrase btw 🫶)
  • -n, --no-spaces — separates words with dashes instead of spaces. for the girlies who hate whitespace 🎀

The default word count in the passphrase is 6. to change it, just drop a number as the word-count positional argument after the pass-name. You can specify the word count as low as 1 — although, and I cannot stress this enough, this is clearly not recommended. 😭 literally please don't.

🧚 NOTES 🧚

In many cases one could simply generate a passphrase using any tool and pipe it to pass insert. However — and this is the plot twist — that might be problematic when editing an existing password, because pass insert uses the standard input for interactive prompts and confirmations. messy. 🙈

The command uses a helper script written in Python for securely shuffling the dictionary file. So please make sure Python is installed — either version 2.7 or 3.6/3.7. check before you come for the crown, bestie 👑

💀 BUGS 💀

Please report bugs to the Issues page on Github: https://github.com/congma/pass-genphrase/issues 🐛

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

pass(1) — that's it. that's the list. quality over quantity, iykyk ⭐

Copyright (C) 2017--2019 Cong Ma and contributors. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later — https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html 🫶

This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. (say it louder for the people in the back, NO WARRANTY 😤)

See the file CONTRIBUTORS for the source of contributions. 💜

Diceware[™] is a trademark of Arnold G. Reinhold. 🎀

and that's the whole page, bestie! 💖 this one's from the PASS corner of the manual, dated 2019 May 12, tucked under the PASS-GENPHRASE(1) header. go forth and generate responsibly ✨🌸🦋

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