PassWord generator
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A major PITA these days is the need to have and frequently change secure
passwords.

Anything you can remember is often disallowed because it is "too insecure".
And don't even think about writing them down or even worse, placing them in
a computer file, because things might be hacked and it could get out!

When you finally get one that both is accepted and you might remember, you
often get notices that "passwords may have been compromized and should be
changed".

Multiply these problems by the number of online services that you use..
each one should have a differemt password because otherwise when one of them
get hacked, they all become vulnerable.

PW is a little utility I created to generate multiple secure passwords for you.
The passwords are generated from two other password "compionents":

 #1 - This is a "master" to generate all others, and should be something
      secure and one you can remember. Don't write this down ANYWHERE
      because it is the key to all the others, and is the only thing you
      need need to be able to remember.

 #2 - A unique password component for each service. This one you can write
      down and don't have to remember because it is stored on the PW.INI file.
      It's main purpose is to be different for each service, insuring that
      the generated password are unique.

How to use PW:

You must to create the PW.INI file, this identitied the services that you use,
the characters allowed in passwords, and contains service specific components
of the passwords. A sample PW.INI is provided with lots of comment describing
what it contains.  You can start with this and edit it to suit your needs.

You will also need a master password. This should be something quite secure
(don't use you name, address etc.) and shouldn't be recorded anywhere except
your memory.  The good news is that this is the only one you will have to
remember.

Then you can simply use the PW utility:

  PW masterpassword [name..]

'masterpassword' is the master password you have pick out. You should not
even put it in .BAT files, just get used to typing it as an argument to the
PW command when you need it.

The remaining arguments are names of services you have defined in PW.INI.
These may contain wildcard characters (?=match any one character, *=match
any series of characters).  EG: To see all services you have named starting
with 'email', use: PW masterpassword email*
Note if you do not specify any names, it defaults to '*' which will show you
the passwords for all services.

It is worth also pointing out that you should NOT print, capture or store
the output of PW anywhere. This will contain the actual passwords for your
services, and should be only shown on the screen and then cleared.

Once you get the generated password for a service, simply use it as your
password. You can use PW with your master password to retrieve it at any
time in case you forget it.

and you can change ALL you generated passwords simply by changing the master.

I will MOT publish or otherwise disclose the algorithms used by PW to generate
passwords. 

Dave Dunfield   -   https://dunfield.themindfactory.com
 another way to find me: search "Dave's Old Computers" and see my
 "personal" link at bottom.   Download and see my product CATALOG!
