Make Passwords In The Linux Terminal

Today’s article should be fairly simple and is about something we all use because it’s about how to make passwords in the Linux terminal. Assuming my writing chops are up for it, this article should be easy for everyone to follow. I’ll do my best. It might not even be a very long article.

I don’t think I need to explain passwords to any modern computer user. Even mobile users use passwords. The rare people who don’t use this technology will likely still use a PIN for things like their ATMs and credit cards. A PIN is just a numeric password.

I think it’s safe to say that we all know what a password is and why we use one. I’m not sure we all understand how to create good passwords, but we all use them. Perhaps this xkcd comic will amuse you:

xkcd's thoughts on passwords
Hopefully, this works as a hotlink, per xkcd’s request. I also can’t resize it. Ah well…

I have written about passwords in the past. One of the first articles on this site was about generating complex passwords. Here’s a link:

How To: Generate Sufficiently Complex Passwords In The Terminal

There isn’t much to add about passwords. It’s safe to assume we’re on the same page and that we’ve all used many passwords in our lives. I guess it’s then time to move along to the software we’ll be using to generate passwords in the Linux terminal.

Installing makepasswd:

In a previous article, we made complex passwords (with some degree of randomness) in the Linux terminal with a tool known as ‘pwgen’. You’ll find that pwgen is perfectly adequate and does a fine job at creating unique passwords in the terminal.

This time around, as we accomplish the very same task, we’ll be using a tool known as makepasswd. When you install makepasswd you’ll see that it has some small dependencies involving encryption and randomness. That makes some sense when you see how makepasswd is described on the man page.

makepasswd – generate and/or encrypt passwords

We’ll be doing that first bit – that is generating passwords.

You will need an open terminal to follow along in this next section. You can also use your graphical software installer, assuming you have one. To open your terminal, you can usually just press CTRL + ALT + T. 

With your terminal now open, choose the right command for your distro:

Debian/Ubuntu/etc:

OpenSUSE/SUSE/etc:

Arch/Manjaro/etc:

RHEL/CentOS/etc:

You’ll find that makepasswd is available for other distros, but I’m not sure of the installation commands and don’t want to steer you wrong. As it stands, I’m pulling these from my notes and haven’t tested them to ensure the commands are current. If they’re not current, please leave a comment so that I can update them accordingly.

Now that you have makepasswd installed…

Make Passwords In The Linux Terminal:

If you used a GUI tool to install makepasswd, or if you closed the terminal after installing makepasswd, you’ll need to open a terminal. Fortunately, I told you how to do that in the previous section. If you want to use makepasswd to make passwords in the Linux terminal, you will of course need an open Linux terminal.

With the terminal now open, you can check the man page for more information about the makepasswd application. That’s done like so:

The application is pretty simple, at least for our needs. If you just want to generate a password that’s 12 characters long, you’d run this command:

An example output might be something like this:

If you want to use certain characters, you can use the --string flag. So, if you wanted to generate a 12 character password with just numbers, you’d use a command that looks like this:

An example output might be something like this:

So, I suppose, you could even use this as a tool to generate a pseudorandom PIN for your debit card. 

If you want to generate a list of passwords so that you can pick the one you like from the list, you can do that as well. That command would look a little bit like the following command:

For some reason, it seems to only want to output a maximum number of characters in that command and the maximum number is 10. Do not ask me why, but the option is there and the output of that command might look a bit like this:

You can do quite a bit more with the makepasswd application. As mentioned above, check the man page. You can seed your passwords, you can encrypt them, get the hashed password value, and more. You could even take the above command and output it to a text file called passwords.txt. You’d do that like this:

As you can see in that command, I’ve included the --maxchars flag. You can set both the minimum number of characters and the maximum number of characters with the two flags used in the above two commands.

See? You’ll find makepasswd to be a handy way to make passwords in the Linux terminal. There are all sorts of ways to do this. This is just one more way.

Closure:

I wasn’t sure what I’d write when I sat down to write this article. I started it much earlier in the day than I usually would and flipped through all sorts of text files to find an interesting article to write. The first two articles that piqued my writer’s interest were topics I’d previously covered. I eventually settled on makepasswd. After all, you never know when you will want to make passwords in the Linux terminal. It could happen!

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Show Your Graphics Card Version

Today’s article will not be all that complicated, consisting of just one real command that will show your graphics card version. This is information handy for things like finding drivers or for troubleshooting. You might also use this information to verify that you got the product you ordered without having to open the case.

This article won’t have a lot of substance to it. The content is just from my notes and I figured that it was useful information to have. I’m quite certain that this knowledge is out there somewhere. I’d credit the person(s) who shared the information with me, but I don’t have that information. So, thanks for the article idea, whoever you are.

There are all sorts of ways to learn about your graphics card. Of course, there are. This is Linux! We’ll just be covering one way to learn this information and to display this information in the terminal. That sounds just like the kind of thing we do here on Linux-Tips.

This time around, we’ll be installing an application. The application may not be installed by default in some distros, so we’ll cover the installation process as well. Ideally, even a brand-new user can follow along with this article. They’ll need to cut and paste as they learn a little about an application known as glxinfo.

About glxinfo:

The glxinfo application may not be installed by default and you may need to install it. You’ll find that it briefly describes itself as this:

glxinfo – show information about the GLX implementation

Importantly, the man page elaborates, giving more information:

The glxinfo program shows information about the OpenGL and GLX implementations running on a given X display.

The information includes details about the server and client-side GLX implementation, the OpenGL and GLU implementations as well as a list of available GLX visuals.

So, you can do more with glxinfo than just get the graphics card version. The odds are good that we’ll revisit glxinfo in a future article. It’s a good thing that you’ve already installed it by the time that article rolls off the presses!

Installing glxinfo:

We’ll be installing glxinfo with the terminal. You can usually just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal will open up. If it doesn’t, you can assign it as a keyboard shortcut and open it from the application menu.

You may have glxinfo installed already, you can run the following command. If any information comes out the other side, you have glxinfo already installed and can skip the installation section:

With your terminal open (and you’ll need it for the next section), you may need to start this process by installing glxinfo. You should find that glxinfo is available for most distros, so use the appropriate command below:

Debian/Ubuntu/etc:

SUSE/OpenSUSE/etc:

RHEL/Fedora/etc:

Arch/Manjaro/etc:

I’m not 100% sure of the following, but:

Gentoo:

One of those should work to install glxinfo. Which one will depend on the package manager you’re using. I don’t have enough experience with Gentoo, but Google tells me that’s the command you want.

Now that you have glxinfo installed…

Show Your Graphics Card Version:

It’s hopefully true that you installed glxinfo and left your terminal open after that. If you didn’t, you’ll need to open your terminal again. You need an open terminal to run the glxinfo application. So, if you closed the terminal you should open it again now.

The first thing you can check is glxinfo’s man page. That’s nice and simple:

As you see, there aren’t a whole lot of options – but there’s a whole lot of information involved. If you want, you can just run this command:

See what I mean about being overwhelmed with information?

Fortunately, we only want to show the graphics card version. That means we can use grep for this exercise. To just show your graphics card version (and a little superfluous information, narrowed down nicely), you would want to use this command:

As you can see, the command uses grep to show fields with the vendor, the device, and the version number. That’s all you need to know for this exercise, though glxinfo does provide a great deal of additional information.

Closure:

Well, that’s about it for this article – and it is another article. This one can come in handy for things like new computers or reminding yourself what you have installed. It’s a quick and easy way to show your graphics card version and a handy application with a bunch of information. It has more information about your graphics than I’d care to know. I’m not even sure what to do with all that information.

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Let’s Make A Linux Installation Drive

Today’s article might seem like a duplicate article, but it’s just another way that you can make a Linux installation drive. Today, we’ll be showing you yet another way to accomplish your goals. Why? Because we can! Because Linux has umpteen different ways to reach your goals – and that is awesome.

We’ll also be using a different tool for this exercise. It’s a pretty handy tool, suitable for more than just making an installation drive. Specifically, a USB thumbdrive! But, that’s just one thing you can do with this tool. It’s my way of introducing you to the tool in a useful manner. 

So, what tool will be using?

Introduction To ddrescue:​

The tool we’ll be using is called ddrescue and it’s a pretty handy tool. You probably won’t find ddrescue pre-installed, so you’ll almost certainly need to install it yourself. 

Also, if you want some confusion, if you’re using Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc., you’ll find it’s gddrescue at least during the installation process. Why? I don’t know. You’ll have to find out from the Turks.

Once you do have ddrescue installed, you’ll find the man page (man ddrescue) describes the application like this:

That’s right, it’s a data recovery tool! We won’t be doing any of that, however. You can probably install ddrescueview and do some of that good old data recovery with a handy GUI. I’m telling you, check the man page. This article is just going to scratch the surface.

Let’s Install ddrescue:

Yes, you can open up some GUI, type in an application name, and then install ddrescue. Or, you can open the terminal and install ddrescue without any GUI help at all. Let’s do that! Press CTRL + ALT + T to (hopefully) open up your terminal.

With your terminal now open, use the appropriate following command to start the installation process:

Debian/Ubuntu/etc:

Fedora/CentOS/etc:

Arch/Manjaro/etc:

If you don’t use any of those package managers, you may still have ddrescue in your default repositories. I just can’t confirm that you do.

Now, with ddrescue installed (even if you had to call it gddrescue during the installation phase), we can get into the meat of the article!

Make A Linux Installation Drive:

Remember that terminal that you opened to install ddrescue? Well, I hope you left it open because you’re going to need it. While the ddrescueview tool is a graphical tool, that won’t help with what we’re doing. We’ll be using the tool to make a Linux installation drive, which is almost an afterthought for this tool.

First, like a previous article about making a Linux install USB, we need to identify your target device. Plug in  your USB thumbdrive and use the following command to identify it:

You should be able to easily pick out your USB device by size. It will begin with an ‘sd’ (remember that it’s case-sensitive) and then may be broken down into partitions. Ignore the partitions and know that you’ll be removing any information on that USB drive.

You’re looking for something like sdb or sdc and you’ll add a ‘dev‘ in front of it. So, if your thumbdrive is sdb, your path is /dev/sdb. If your thumbdrive is located as sdc, the path you want is /dev/sdc. It’s pretty simple.

The syntax is as follows:

For example, this would be a command I could use:

This would let me write today’s current Lubuntu testing .iso to a USB drive so that I can test it on a laptop without having to waste the bandwidth to download the same file twice. 

Pretty handy, huh? 

Well, there’s a lot more you can do with ddrescue. I highly recommend reading the man page to learn more about this nifty application. It can do quite a bit more than this. Indeed, this is more an afterthought than anything else, or so it seems.

Closure:

Well, there you go. You have a new article. That happens regularly around here! Today we talked about yet another way to make a Linux installation drive. Frankly, you can just use balenaEtcher and call it a day. There’s no reason for most of us to do this in the terminal – but we can and it’s not even that difficult. You just need the right tools for the job and Linux has many tools on offer.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

How To: Sort Text Alphabetically

Today’s article is mostly just a fun article, one suitable for a beginner, as we learn how to sort text alphabetically. We’ll be doing this in the terminal, of course. If you’re a new user and want to get acclimated to using the terminal, this might be a good article to read. It won’t be short, but it should be easy.

I dimly recall watching an old video about the Unix operating system. Of course, this was all terminal activity. I want to say that it was Dennis Ritchie or some other Unix founder, but they did things like cut and paste along with stuff like piping the output to a new document.

Even though I’d used Unix (and then Linux) before this, I still appreciated the demonstration video. It was indicative of how powerful the terminal can be. If I was less lazy, I’d go hit up YouTube to find the video again. I haven’t seen it in years.

Anyhow, we’ll be learning how to sort text alphabetically. It’ll be fun!

The Sort Command:

As I said, we’ll be doing this text sorting in the terminal. The tool we’ll be using is the sort tool. You won’t need to install anything to use the sort command. It’ll be there by default.

The sort command has a man page. You can access the man page with this command:

If you do that, you’ll see how powerful the sort command can be when used by someone who knows what they’re doing. We’ll just cover some basics. You can also see that the sort command is described as this:

sort – sort lines of text files

That description says that we’re using the right tool for the job. We want to sort lines of text files alphabetically. It’s not hard. You have to learn which tool is the best for the job you want to do. (Also, the tools I think are the best are the best for me, the tools you prefer are the tools that are best for you. This being Linux, there are always multiple ways to accomplish the same goal!)

While not necessarily a part of this article, you might also want to read this article to learn about using the output from these commands.

How To: Write Text To A File From The Terminal with “>” and “>>”

So then, let’s get into the meat of the article…

Sort Text Alphabetically:

For this exercise, we’re going to need an open terminal. This is quickly done. You can, more often than not, just press CTRL + ALT + T to open the terminal. 

With the terminal open, we need to do a little file preparation. This way, we’re all on the same page. I hope that it’ll be easier this way.

Create A Text File:

With your terminal open, I want you to enter the following commands…

You’ll first move to a directory and create a file:

Now, let’s populate that sort.txt file. We’ll edit the file with Nano.

Copy and paste the following text into that sort.txt file:

And, of course, we’ll now save the file. To save a file in Nano, you just need to press CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER. That should save the file as sort.txt. You can verify this with this command:

When the output from that command matches your expectations, you’re free to go to the next step. If it doesn’t, repeat the above commands carefully, following them one by one. If you still can’t manage to do this, you can download a copy of sort.txt here.

Using The Sort Command:

Now that you have a file called sort.txt in your ~/Documents directory, you can start to sort it. We’re just going to sort text alphabetically as a way to expose you to the sort command. 

If you want to sort the text alphabetically, you use this command:

It will send the results to standard output, that is it’ll post the sorted output to the terminal. (You can save this output as I’ll show in a minute.) The output of that command should look like this:

If you want to sort the content of the sort.txt file backward, you can do that. You just use the -r flag. That looks like this:

As an example, the output from that command should look like this:

I linked an article above and it’s worth reading if you’re new. But, if you want to output any of this output to a new file, you’d do so like this:

The command’s syntax would be:

That’s not very clear, so you can use this example to figure it out:

That will take the alphabetically sorted output and write it to a file named sorted.txt. It’s a good way to sort text and there’s quite a bit more to the sort command.

Please consider reading the ‘Closure’ bit, thanks!

Closure:

Well, this is a long article – but it should still be an easy article. I’m hopeful that this is written in a way that even a new user can follow. Please consider leaving a comment letting me know if this is easy to follow. Seriously…

See, as the author, I have no flippin’ idea if this stuff is really easy to follow. I legit have no idea if it’s as easy as I think it is to follow along in this article. One of the things I’ve done is play around with formatting and making the articles more verbose. I’ve tried to not increase the verbosity just for verbosity’s sake, but rather to explain more.

I mean, it’s easy enough for me to follow. After all, I wrote it.

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How To: Zip Files In Lubuntu

Today’s article will be relatively short and fairly easy as we talk about how to zip files in Lubuntu. This seems like a nice and easy article and something folks might want to know. If you’re in this category, by all means, read on!

NOTE: This is written for Lubuntu, but will work in other distros. I’m just trying something new, specifically doing some distro-specific articles to see how well they do.

If you’re unfamiliar with Lubuntu, it’s a lovely distro that’s fairly lightweight and easily configurable. Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor. The purpose of Lubuntu has changed. The focus has changed from being lightweight (which it still is) to getting out of your way. You can read some of the history on Wikipedia’s Lubuntu article.

I’m biased because I’m an official Lubuntu member. I’m on the team that brings you this distro and have written a few Lubuntu-specific articles.

Disable Window Grouping In Lubuntu
Change Snap Application Privileges In Lubuntu
Change Your DNS Servers To Google’s In Lubuntu

(There are more, of course!)

I’m definitely a fan.

Anyhow, we’ll be learning to zip files in Lubuntu today. When you zip a file, you compress the file and make a new file. Some files don’t compress while other files (such as plain text files) can be compressed quite a bit. There are many different compression tools, methods, and algorithms. I’ve covered some RAR stuff in the past, for example.

Zip Files In Lubuntu:

We’ll be using the zip application in the terminal to zip files in Lubuntu. You can compress files graphically, but we’ll be doing this in the terminal. You can do almost anything in the terminal. So, let’s start by pressing CTRL + ALT + T to open the terminal.

The tool we’ll be using is the zip application, defined simply as:

zip – package and compress (archive) files

For the record, the zip application should be installed by default. I don’t like to assume the default is still true, so I’ll also explain how to install the application, also in the terminal.

You can install the zip application with this command:

You can check the man page for zip with this command:

To zip a file in Lubuntu, you would run this command:

If you want to zip multiple files in Lubuntu, you can just add them to the command by tagging them on the end. That looks like this:

See? It’s just that easy to zip files in Lubuntu – specifically in the terminal. Of course, this is true for all sorts of other distros. The only thing that would change would be the process for installing the application should it not be installed by default.

Closure:

Yup… I told you that this would be a quick and easy article. I will actually (probably) cover more of this very topic. It’s a way to keep fresh articles on the site, by being distro/distro-family specific. Yeah, I know that it’s more convenient to have big articles that cover a lot of information. At the same time, writing them all is a lot like work – largely because you start running out of ideas for new articles.

By the way, I could so use a break. You should write an article for me! In fact, you should write a whole series of articles!

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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