ankitpati

Not a single other implementation has feature-parity with Perl. Perl regexes are not only Turing-complete, but can also execute arbitrary code¹ as part of the regex evaluation.

PCRE is the pinnacle of deceptive advertising. It is emphatically not Perl-Compatible.

Source: I used to write Perl for a living, and I have battle scars from (¹) above.

Core, not chore.

Most pertinent advice I’ve seen in a while.

Every OS released in the past ten years supports it.

This, right here, is why I never use acronyms with the sixth letter of the English alphabet anywhere in them. Heck, as you might already have noticed, I don’t use said letter at all, unless it is part of a word.

This is one “human corner case” I have no shame working around. Wouldn’t want to convey hostility where none exists.

I am a C coder, and I cannot wait to have my code on the web, decimating inferior languages like JavaScript. If a startup relies on JavaScript to keep out competition from C coders, well, too bad. They will be decimated in terms of performance. The web will be ruled by the best performing apps written in the language of the Linux kernel.

1. Sorry, didn't know about that. Just took a cursory glance through the source code.

3. 126 lines in 1 file is still an order of magnitude smaller.

4. The source has a Perl and a sed script, although they are not used in the password generation.

(2) is still a concern, especially on servers and embedded computers.

pwgen

1. Focuses on memorable passwords, and restricts itself to fewer ASCII characters than rpg.

2. Makes no attempt to preserve entropy; waste of entropy is potentially unbounded. This is a performance concern when reading from /dev/random, and a security concern when reading from /dev/urandom.

3. Has large source code spread across multiple files. Good for reusability of components, not so good for auditability and security.

4. Requires Perl and sed.

A command-line password generator that sources entropy from /dev/urandom (configurable in the source to /dev/random), generates printable ASCII passwords without whitespace, and preserves entropy with a guarantee to waste no more than 63 bits of entropy in a single invocation on most modern machines.