Gregg's MOTD

Tips & Tricks that I've Encountered Over the Years...

Using passwordgen On Slackware

July 14, 2023 — Gregg Szumowski

The well known ss64.com site has a lot of useful tips and tricks for **nix* users and they also have a script that you can download which will create and maintain passwords for you.

If you go to their command line section you can use the link to their GitHub site and download it for yourself. However, when I followed their installation instructions I ran into difficulty because the script has a dependency on pbcopy or gclip (which wasn’t documented) and since I run Slackware 15.0 the copy to clipboard feature failed.

The workaround for this is to install either xclip or xsel from Slackbuilds.org and make a minor modification to the script as described here:

22c22,23
< which gclip pbcopy | grep -v -m 1 'not found'
---
> which xclip xsel | grep -v -m 1 'not found'
>
52c53
< ss64pwd_to_clipboard $one_arg
---
> ss64pwd_to_clipboard -selecton clipboard $one_arg

Tags: cli, password-managers, motd

Parsing Bitwarden CLI

June 15, 2023 — Gregg Szumowski

If you use the excellent Bitwarden app for you password storage you may not be aware that they also have a command line version on Linux. It outputs data using the JSON format. You can install the jq JSON parser and pipe the output of the CLI’s query to it in order to extract the username and password for a specific site in your search:

$ bw list items --search accounts.google.com | jq '.[] | .login.uris[].uri,.login.username,.login.password'
"https://accounts.google.com"
"john.doe@gmail.com"
"** password1 **"
"https://accounts.google.com"
"jdoe@gmail.com"
"** password2 **"

Tags: cli, bitwarden, json, password-managers, motd