WPA Password Generator

I know a lot of us use WPA for your access points (you better not be using WEP!!) and I happened upon this while looking for some other stuff. It is a simple password generator to make sure your WPA keys arn't easily guessable. It has a few modifications that I have made. I have found that WPA works best in ALL CAPS. I have worked with quite a few laptops that wouldn't connect if the passphrase had any lowercase letters. Weird huh?! I have also found that it works best when you have 13 characters. I don't know why but that has just been my experience. Hopefully these 'issues' are resolved in latter wireless standards because if everyone used only uppercase/numbers & kept it at 13 characters it would only be a matter of time before your hacked. This script is fully capable of generating whatever characters you want, you just have to add them in.

Note; this could also be used for other situations besides WPA.
Note; this is not my original work. It was posted to another site by an anonymous user. Sadly, I am unable to give them credit for their good work.

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wpa-pass.sh

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#!/bin/bash

# Sets the maximum size of the password the script will generate
MAXSIZE=13

# Holds valid password characters. I choose alpha-numeric + the shift-number keyboard keys
# I put escape chars on all the non alpha-numeric characters just for precaution
array1=(
#w e r t y u p a s d f h j k z x c v b m
Q W E R T Y U P A D F H J K L Z X C V B N M
2 3 4 7 8
#! @ $ % \# \& \* \= \- \+ \?
)

# Used in conjunction with modulus to keep random numbers in range of the array size
MODNUM=${#array1[*]}

# Keeps track of the number characters in the password we have generated
pwd_len=0

while [ $pwd_len -lt $MAXSIZE ]
do
index=$(($RANDOM%$MODNUM))
password="${password}${array1[$index]}"
((pwd_len++))
done
echo $password

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