pwkickstart(1)

🌸 pwkickstart(1) 🌸

okay so bestie, welcome to the pwkickstart(1) page — it's short, it's sweet, and it's gonna hand you kickstart passwords like it's nothing 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

pwkickstart — generate kickstart passwords 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

By default it spits out kickstart-compatible syntax, no extra flags required, it just does the thing.

Generates kickstart-compatible syntax by default.

$ pwkickstart
Password:

# md5
rootpw --iscrypted $1$SI$D964QyK1.Iz/
# sha256
rootpw --iscrypted $5$Ll/Q6$SEYqHGso3maNbtBc1wjyiyr2
# sha512
rootpw --iscrypted $6$MN7wS$1QE3FmSBrN71tXV8y.Blif1avdhTYt/

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So the whole vibe of pwkickstart is: you feed it a password, it prints kickstart passwords to standard output in three different formats — md5, sha256, and sha512. That's it. That's the job. Iconic, honestly. 👑

Back in the day, grub-crypt did the exact same thing, but it's not longer available in some Linux distributions — so this little cutie is here to pick up the slack. 🫶

Also fyi, the output in the SYNOPSIS example up there was shortened to fit on screen. No cap.

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✨ NON-INTERACTIVE MODE ✨

The utility accepts exactly one parameter — the password. Entries come out sorted from oldest to newest. 🕰️✨

$ pwkickstart mypass
$1$6FrN7YsS$2o3lfiD9T4LlUfKBgCe0X1
$5$S2Zab0elQkL7fN.ikw.jmZeb7qtEK7DJESPDv9
$6$slYmPDc8PtwOPmnx$9u3X3NE73XxuU7.5YlJAm/QMEahzx

Wanna get the "strongest" possible hash? Just grab the last line, bestie:

$ pwkickstart mypass | tail -n1
$6$slYmPDc8PtwOPmnx$9u3X3NE73XxuU7.5YlJAm/QMEahzx

Or grep exactly what's needed:

$ pwkickstart mypass | grep '
$6$slYmPDc8PtwOPmnx$9u3X3NE73XxuU7.5YlJAm/QMEahzx

(yeah, that quote is still hanging open. copy it exactly as it appears, we don't make the rules 🙈)

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✨ LICENSE ✨

MIT License 🎀

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• openssl(1)

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✨ AUTHOR ✨

Lukas Zapletal <lzap+spam@redhat.com> 💜

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and that's the whole page, bestie — version 1.0.3, dated 25 July 2025. go forth and hash responsibly 🦋✨