Replacement for Ancient UNIX Crypt
A legacy UNIX crypt (1) utility replacement...
In the dark ages of computing, UNIX had a really dodgy and cryptographically unsound encryption/decryption tool named crypt. Nowadays, most UNIX variants do not include this tool because there are far better alternatives available. That is probably a good thing, and we should be happy. Unfortunately, many files were previously encrypted using this tool, and even some strange people still use it (crypt was still bundled with the last version of Silicon Graphics' IRIX operating system, for example). That causes a problem, especially since I couldn't find a free version of crypt that worked under Linux when I needed it.
That is no big problem for me because, back in 2001, I wrote my own version. Yippee! And, you can download it here. For free, even! The source-code is available under the terms of a permissive open-source license, so you can pretty much do whatever you want with it.
- my_crypt.c - View full C source.
- my_crypt.c - Download full C source.
- crypt.x86_64 - Download Linux x86_64 executable.
- crypt.arm5 - Download Linux ARM-5 executable.
It works exactly as the original UNIX version did:
crypt [-s] passkey < file > encrypted_file crypt [-s] passkey < encrypted_file > file
Full compilation instructions for the source code are included within the source code, for your convenience.
Warning: This is NOT designed to be cryptographically secure. It is solely intended as a means to decrypt files which were encrypted using the legacy UNIX crypt utility, although it probably has some pedagogical value.
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