With password-based authentication so prevalent online these days, you may need or already use some sort of password management tool to keep track of all the passwords you are using. There are various online or offline services or software tools for that matter, and they vary in terms of their sophistication, user interface or target environments (e.g., enterprises or end users). For example, there are a few GUI-based password managers for end users, such as [KeePass(X)][1].
For those of you who do not want any kind of GUI dependency for password management, I will describe how to manage passwords from the command line by using [pass][2], **a simple command-line utility for password management**.
The pass utility is in fact a shell script frontend which uses several other tools (e.g., gpg, pwgen, git, xsel) to manage user's password info using OpenPGP. Each password is encrypted with gpg utility, and stored in a local password store. Password info can be retrieved either via terminal or self-clearing clipboard interface.
The pass utility is quite flexible and extremely simple to use. You can store each password info in an OpenPGP-protected plain text file, and group different password files into multiple categories. It supports bash auto completion feature, so it is very convenient to fill in commands or long password names using TAB key.
Before using pass utility, you need to do one-time initialization step which involves creating a GPG key pair (if you don't have one) and a local password store.
It will ask you a series of questions as shown below. If you are not sure, you can accept default answers. As part of key generation, you will set a passphrase for your secret key, which is essentially the master password required to access any password info stored in local password store. A successfully generated key pair will be stored in ~/.gnupg
Next, initialize the local password store by running the following command. For <gpg-id>, enter the email address associated your GPG key created above.接下来，运行以下命令来初始化本地密码仓库。对于<gpg-id>，输入上面创建密钥对时的关联电子邮件地址。
<password-name> is an arbitrary name you define, and can be hierarchical (e.g., "finance/tdbank", "online/gmail.com"), in which case the password info will be created in corresponding sub-directories under ~/.password-store
If you want to insert password info as multi-lines, use "-m" option as follows. Type in password info in any format as you like, and press Ctrl+D to finish.
With `pass`, you can also generate a new random password which you can use for any purpose. pass will use pwgen utility to generate a good random password. You can specify the length of a password, or generate a password with or without symbols.
To summarize, pass is extremely flexible, portable, and more importantly, easy to use. I highly recommend pass to anyone looking for a simple means to organize any kind of private info in a secure fashion, without relying on GUI dependency.
