My Random Password Generator

 Computing, Linux, Security  No Responses »
Nov 062021
 

Someone asked me about this – a zsh function which I use to generate random passwords :-

✓ mike@pica» rpass noise
oOg6vsM+V0It4he6US4Xk6DuZPja9okyOpQyUCfW6NQ=
✓ mike@pica» rpass words
patternmaker+meio+tubicolous+misbelievingly

It’s too small and simple for me to classify as “open source” but there’s no harm in sharing the function :-

✓ mike@pica» which rpass
rpass () {
	case "$1" in
		("noise") dd if=/dev/random bs=1 count=32 status=none | base64 -i ;;
		("words") punct=("," "." "<" ">" "/" ";" ":" "-" "+" "=") 
			onep=${punct[$(($RANDOM % ${#punct[@]} + 1 ))]} 
			w1=$(shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words | sed -e "s/'.*$//") 
			w2=$(shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words | sed -e "s/'.*$//") 
			w3=$(shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words | sed -e "s/'.*$//") 
			w4=$(shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words | sed -e "s/'.*$//") 
			echo "${w1}${onep}${w2}${onep}${w3}${onep}${w4}" ;;
		("*") echo $1 not understood ;;
	esac
}

This is just a simple zsh function with all sorts of little “issues” – not least is that it could at least say “$1 not understood – try ‘words’ or ‘noise'”.

Zsh: Devouring Tools or Hiding the Terminal

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Jun 212020
 

There has been a bit of a rush on Youtube videos describing how to hide the terminal when running certain commands; when using the terminal as a file browser you may want to show a media file. And sometimes when showing that file, you may wish to hide the terminal – particularly on a small laptop screen.

Just for fun, I decided to take one of the recipes and adapt it for my working environment which revolves around the zsh when I am in a terminal window.

To start with, I need the xdo tool, which can be installed with :-

$ sudo apt install xdo

Once that is installed, I modified a shell script from https://github.com/salman-abedin/devour/blob/master/ into a zsh function. I created a function file within my FPATH (~/lib/zsh/functions/devour) :-

function devour {
  id=$(xdo id)
  xdo hide
  . $@
  xdo show "$id"
}

Note that I have deliberately not redirected stdout and stderr away.

I then added the following to my .zshrc :-

autoload devour

The next step is to create aliases for the commands you might want to run automatically in such a way :-

alias mpv="devour mpv"

Although I am not sure “devour” is the right word to use for this action, but I have yet to think of a better one.

Zsh: Renewed Hostname Completion

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Jun 082019
 

Quite a while ago, I “borrowed” some inscrutable zsh magic to automatically add the contents of ~/.ssh/known_hosts to a known_hostsi variable and used that variable to perform host name completion for certain commands. Once ssh started hashing the known_hosts file, this broke and I was busy at the time and stopped using it.

Ages later, I’ve fixed it and enhanced it a bit (and arguably made it a bit simpler). Not only does it pick up host names from the known_hosts file but also adds a list from lxc-ls and adds a few static host names (with one exception, not shown). This is done by adding the following to .zshrc :-

knownhosts=( $(sudo -b lxc-ls) )
#       Pick up a list of hosts from lxc-ls
knownhosts+="localhost"
#       Add static hostnames
for x in $(grep -v "|" ~/.ssh/known_hosts | awk '{print $1}' | awk -F, '{printf "%s ", $1}')
do
  knownhosts+=$x
done
#       Pull a list of hosts out of ~/.ssh/known_hosts excluding the Hashed hosts.
zstyle ':completion:*:(ssh|scp|sftp|ping|nmap):*' hosts $knownhosts
#       Commands to use a list of known hosts with

That probably is not the most efficient code, but does have the advantage that it is relatively easy to follow.

One addition is to add the option HashKnownHosts no to ~/.ssh/config.

There is of course a risk associated with disabling the hashing of host names within the known_hosts file. If your host becomes compromised, malicious code can use that file to obtain a list of hosts with which there is a trust relationship making it easier for an attacker to pivot through your network.

Zsh: The Start Of An ‘Intelligent’ Pager

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Mar 092018
 

One of the things that annoys me about pagers such as less, more, most, etc. is that they are dumb in the sense that they cannot detect the format of the text file they are displaying. For example, all of a sudden I find myself reading lots of markdown-formatted files, and I find myself using most to display it – never remembering that it is mdv I want.

As it happens, when I invoke a pager at the shell prompt, I typically use an alias (page or pg) to invoke a preferred pager, and by extending this functionality into a function I can start to approach what I want :-

function extension {
  printf "%s\n" ${${argv/*\./}:l}
}

function page {
 if [[ -z $argv ]]
 then
   $PAGER
 else
   case $(extension $argv) in
     "md")
       mdv -A $argv | $PAGER
       ;;
     "man")
       groff -m mandoc -Tutf8 $argv | $PAGER
       ;;
     *)
       $PAGER $argv
       ;;
     esac
   fi
}

(the function “extension” has had a quick bug fix applied to smash the filename extension to lowercase)

Of course there are undoubtedly umpteen errors in that, and probably better ways to do it too. And it won’t work properly on its own ($PAGER hasn’t been set).

But it’s the start of something I can use to display all sorts of text files in a terminal window without having to remember all those commands. But as for ‘intelligent’, nope it’s not that – just a bit smarter than the average pager.

Getting The Maximum Of A Set Of Numbers

 Computing, Linux, Working Notes  No Responses »
Dec 102015
 

damascus-unix-prompt

You have a a column of numbers that you have produced in some manner such as :-

$ awk '/clean message/ {print $(NF-1)}' mail.info.log
...
100935
12197
3606
84653
4498
99110
4762
3001
10889
12611
12249
12245
136599
49097
6668

And you want a quick and dirty way of finding the largest number. Well there is a way but it is perhaps the least efficient way to do it, and that is to sort the numbers into numerical order and use “head” to display the first one :-

$ awk '/clean message/ {print $(NF-1)}' mail.info.log | sort -rn | head -1
5476168

But frankly there must be a better method. And yes there is if you happen to be using zsh (or possibly others, but this has been tested with zsh). Simply iterate over the values assigning the current value to the “max” variable if the current variable is larger :-

$ max=0; for x in $(awk '/clean message/ {print $(NF-1)}' mail.info.log); [[ $x -gt $max ]] && max=$x; echo $max
5476168

You may be wondering why I don’t simply use the ability of awk to perform calculations. Well that is certainly possible, but I may not always be using awk to produce the numbers in the first place, and this is supposed to be a generic recipe.

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