.TH HASHALOT 1 "09 Feb 2004"
.SH NAME
hashalot \- read a passphrase and print a hash
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B  hashalot [ \-s SALT ] [ \-x ] [ \-n #BYTES ] [ -q ] [ HASHTYPE ]
.br
.B  HASHTYPE [ \-s SALT ] [ \-x ] [ \-n #BYTES ] [ -q ]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.PP
\fIhashalot\fP is a small tool that reads a passphrase from standard
input, hashes it using the given hash type, and prints the result to
standard output.
.PP
\fBWarning\fP: If you do not use the \fB\-x\fP option, the hash is
printed in binary. This may wedge your terminal settings, or even force
you to log out.
.PP
This is not a general purpose hasher, only the first line is used, not even
including the final newline.  Thus, don't be surprised if the output seems
to be different from other tools -- you'd have to hash exactly the same
string.
.PP
Supported values for \fIHASHTYPE\fP:
.br
.RS 8
ripemd160 rmd160 rmd160compat sha256 sha384 sha512
.RE
.PP
.SH OPTIONS
The option
.B \-s \fISALT\fP
specifies an initialization vector to the hashing algorithm. You need
this if you want to prevent identical passwords to map to identical
hashes, which is a security risk.
.PP
If the
.B \-x
option is given then the hash will be printed as a string of hexadecimal
digits.
.PP
The
.B \-n
option can be used to limit (or increase) the number of bytes output. The
default is as appropriate for the specified hash algorithm: 20 bytes for
RIPEMD160, 32 bytes for SHA256, etc. The default for the "rmd160compat"
hash is 16 bytes, for compatibility with the old kerneli.org utilities.
.PP
The
.B \-q
option causes
.B hashalot
to be more quiet and not print some warnings which may be superfluous.
.SH AUTHOR
Ben Slusky <sluskyb@paranoiacs.org>
.PP
This manual page was written by Matthias Urlichs <smurf@debian.org>.