NAME¶

session-token - command-line script for generating session tokens

USAGE¶

    $ session-token
    ATXOpAxCu57sVZvoBiWgHg
    $ session-token --entropy 256
    hk0No9bjuknBxmpIujW3bZvnFmryTvEbTPNitd8L9kC
    $ session-token --length 5 --alphabet ACGT --num 3
    GAATT
    ACCAT
    AATTG
    ## If you don't know how many tokens you need at the start of the pipeline...
    $ session-token --infinity | ... | head

DESCRIPTION¶

This module came about because I found myself frequently running the following command:

    $ perl -MSession::Token -E 'say Session::Token->new->get'
    YwXYXGLMMnudk33MbClseQ

Before I wrote Session::Token I used to run the following command:

    $ openssl rand -base64 16
    fjxhL/LmZEUQ+NCldQbHgA==

They both perform essentially the same task however "session-token" has various advantages:

It is more flexible regarding the alphabet used since it supports any alphabet that Session::Token does via the "--alphabet" switch. Its default alphabet is the (IMO) nice base-62 versus "openssl rand"'s base-64.

It can efficiently generate a large number of random tokens with the "--num" switch. Calling "openssl rand" for each token would fork a lot of processes and open and read from "/dev/urandom" in each one.

If cross-platform determinism is required, the "--seed" or "--null-seed" switches are available and they don't require seed files or anything. Note that you should only use these switches for benchmarks or simulations and never for applications requiring secure randomness since the generated sequence of tokens will be the same for each run.

"openssl rand" does some weirdness with reading from/writing to the "~/.rnd" file in your home directory as a potential entropy source/store. "session-token" will always fail noisily if it can't read from "/dev/urandom".

Finally, "session-token" is easier to remember and type don't you think?

SEE ALSO¶

App-Session-Token github repo <https://github.com/hoytech/App-Session-Token>

Session::Token

AUTHOR¶

Doug Hoyte, "<doug@hcsw.org>"

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE¶

Copyright 2014-2016 Doug Hoyte.

This module is licensed under the same terms as perl itself.