Is it a good idea to use pwsafe – a password manager not updated since 2005

password

I'm looking for a command-line Linux password-manager. It appears that pwsafe is the program most commonly used. However, its latest update was in 2005. Is it a good idea to use this? Has it been so stable that no updates are necessary, or am I risking using outdated software for an important task like password management?

Best Answer

IMO it would be better to use a plain text file with a structured format and then GPG or OpenSSL encrypt it. Or even just plain vim encryption.

The advantage of OpenSSL/GPG over vim is that you can decrypt it on the fly and grep the output.

Here's a nice write up for using vim as a password safe.

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Freebsd – Is it possible (and a good idea) to do `pw lock root` on FreeBSD

I actually did this on my FreeBSD box - so yes, it is possible, but of course you should take care to verify that sudo works properly before you do so ;-)

sudo su will not work anymore, but you can still do sudo bash to get a root shell.

Export passwords from the `pass` password manager

You can do this if you are running gpg-agent (and your passphrase is loaded), by looping through the files in your password store and writing them to a separate file.

You do have to strip the leading directories from the path ($PASSWORD_STORE_DIR) and the .gpg extension from each of the files in the subdirectories, but otherwise it is straightforward enough:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# export passwords to external file

shopt -s nullglob globstar
prefix=${PASSWORD_STORE_DIR:-$HOME/.password-store}

for file in "$prefix"/**/*.gpg; do                           
    file="${file/$prefix//}"
    printf "%s\n" "Name: ${file%.*}" >> exported_passes
    pass "${file%.*}" >> exported_passes
    printf "\n\n" >> exported_passes
done

Best Answer

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Freebsd – Is it possible (and a good idea) to do `pw lock root` on FreeBSD

Export passwords from the `pass` password manager

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