. . . because everyone's always and forever posting realy crappy randpass routines up here. Yours is good, extensible, and secure. Sehr gut.

One minor bit of semantics (since I'm the devil for varname sematics): $salt isn't actually a salt. A salt is variable seed value concatenated with a key to produce different, but still verifiable, output from subequent encryptions/hashings. $salt might be more intuitively called $charset, since it IS the charset from which passwords are drawn.

Oh, and that wasn't idle praise. I'm grabbing this and rewriting it in C for another project of mine as we speak.

Cheers!

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