Setting a randomly generated password to a variable?

Question

I'm using the following line to create a randomly generated password in a bash script, but it doesn't look like the string is actually being set to the variable.

#Generate random password
PASSWORD=date+%s|sha256sum|base64|head -c 32;
echo $PASSWORD

When I reference $PASSWORD later in this script, drush complains that I didn't supply a password. To test, I've tried a few "echoes" to confirm my suspicion. Does it look there's something off in my assignment statements?

Answer 1

You have to use a command substitution:

#Generate random password
PASSWORD=$(date +%s|sha256sum|base64|head -c 32)
echo $PASSWORD

then it should work.

Prefer the "$" sign, read more here: Using backticks or dollar in shell scripts

Answer 2

You need to use a command substitution quotation, like

PASSWORD=`date +%s|sha256sum|base64|head -c 32`
echo $PASSWORD

or you can do it as,

PASSWORD=$(date +%s|sha256sum|base64|head -c 32)
echo $PASSWORD

Answer 3

Generating a password just based on the current time is quite bad.

As you want a 32-character password, I would do something like this:

PASSWORD=$(head -c 16  /dev/random | md5sum | cut -f 1 -d\ )

Answer 4

as not having the reputation to comment I'm forced to add a non answer on this tread

Like @Ángel I was skeptical about generating a password based on time so I did some test

with the command proposed by @Ángel : the password have an average entropy of : 125bits

with the command based on time as proposed by @souravc : the average password entropy is : 175bits

so it's not that bad to generate a password based on time after all ;)