Programmatic VNC password setting


I had this problem recently: I was generating automatic VNC passwords via /dev/urandom, and needed to obfuscate them. Stupidly, vncpasswd is only interactive, and I wasn’t in any kind of mood for hacking up the sources. A co-worker kindly pointed me to the solution:

printf “%s\n%s\n” “$PASSWD” “$PASSWD” | vncpasswd /tmp/vncpasswd

In my head, the use of getpass() means this couldn’t work, but it does. It doesn’t appear to be on Google, so I thought I’d mention it. Of course, as all know, the obfuscation done by vncpasswd is entirely pointless, but Xvnc at least will only take such “encrypted” password files.