Linux has its own cryptographic generator which can easily be harnessed by the common user to generate extremely strong passwords. This password generator can be found at /dev/random. /dev/random generates pseudorandom numbers based on the available entropy of the system (see wiki page ). A derivate of /dev/random called /dev/urandom does the same thing but it is more accessible while being slightly (theoretically) less secure. So what stops us from grabbing outout from /dev/urandom using cat ? An output of the content of /dev/urandom will demonstrate that it is practically gibberish with very few usable random characters. The output of cat / dev / urandom should convince the user. However, it is possible to trim out the unwanted characters and only keep alphabets, numbers, and special characters with a simple filtering by the tr command. cat / dev / urandom | head - c 10 | tr - dc "A-Za-z0-9_!" This command will produce the desired output but it w