PA
Managing passwords
Credit: https://github.com/biox/pa
Shashank Sharma is quite proud of his memory. After all, he always remembers to use the right CLI tools to make his life easy.
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in New Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s always on the hunt for affordable geeky memorabilia.
T here are a myriad ways to store passwords to different online accounts. Some users prefer the simplicity and convenience of browser extensions that do this job. There are also those that use a text file as a repository and others still who prefer to use a desktop password manager. There are obvious disadvantages to using the former two solutions. Thankfully, there are a vast number of password managers that you can use on the Linux desktop.
The relatively new utility pa is inspired by another command-line password manager named pash (https:// github.com/dylanaraps/pash), but while the latter uses GPG to encrypt the passwords to keep them safe, pa, or password ass instead utilises age (https://github.com/FiloSottile/age) to secure your passwords. While pa can be used to merely store passwords, it also boasts of a password generator that can help you create complex passwords with ease. The obvious advantage being that you won’t have to memorise the 50-letter alphanumeric password it coughs up for you.