Can pwgen output passwords of a certain length?

Question

I'm using the command line tool pwgen to generate passwords because I love the repeatability you get with the sha1 command line flag. To quote the man page:

   -H, --sha1=/path/to/file[#seed]
          Will  use the sha1's hash of given file and the optional seed to
          create password. It will allow you to compute the same  password
          later, if you remember the file, seed, and pwgen's options used.
          ie: pwgen -H ~/your_favorite.mp3#your@email.com gives a list  of
          possibles  passwords for your pop3 account, and you can ask this
          list again and again.

          WARNING: The passwords generated using this option are not  very
          random.   If you use this option, make sure the attacker can not
          obtain a copy of the file.  Also, note that the name of the file
          may  be  easily available from the ~/.history or ~/.bash_history
          file.

I'm using it to generate (and retrieve) passwords like this:

pwgen -1cnsy --sha1=/path/to/my/gpg/private-key.asc#username@example.com

The only problem is that I can't figure out a way to specify how many characters I want the password to be. By default it generates an 8-character password, which is more susceptible to brute-forcing.

Alternatively, I could use apg, which allows me to specify the number of characters, but I don't see a way to make apg take a file and string as a seed to give me repeatable characters.

Is there a way I can make pwgen generate passwords of a specified length?

Answer 1

Usage: pwgen [ OPTIONS ] [ pw_length ] [ num_pw ]

Thus:

pwgen -1cnsy --sha1=/path/to/my/gpg/private-key.asc#username@example.com 42

Beware that pwgen will happily print a password that's as long as you request, but beyond a certain point (determined by the entropy of the specified file) that doesn't increase security.