Hey all,
i am wanting to put a list of common passwords on a usb stick, but i want the file to be password protected. I also need to be able to access it from more than one computer (all linux, maybe a mac too).

Open to any suggestions.

I suggest looking at the possibility of using gpg (GNU privacy guard). I think almost all Linux distros have gpg installed by default. TMK Mac and MS Windows don't, but I know versions exist for both. I have a version on a USB drive I can use on public MS Windows computers. If the version for Mac (MacGPG) is similarly portable then you can put both on your USB stick and have all three OS families covered.

You might want to have scripts/batch files (as appropriate for the OS) on the stick to do the decryption so you can automatically define $GNUPGHOME to a directory on your flash drive so you don't leave tracks on the computers you use it on. (Well, at least not create/modify a directory in a user account; the OS can, of course, record that you ran the command.)

thanks, looks like an ideal solution.

1. Create the password file as plain text. Let's say we call it "secrets.txt"

2. Encrypt the file "secrets.txt":

$ openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -e -in secrets.txt -out secrets.enc

When you run this command, it will prompt for a password.

To decrypt:

$ openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -d -in secrets.enc -out secrets.txt

Obviously you could omit the output file specification during the decryption and let the result be printed to stdout. And you could put the encrypted content into a shell script in such a way that the shell script would feed it to openssh and get the unencrypted output on demand.

I use keepassx because I have sufficient authority to install it on all the computers I need to reference this data on. Linux or Windows.

and we have a winner.
keepassX is available on the distro i use at work ( Arch ) and the distro i use at home (debian) and the database can sync on my dropbox account and be carried from usb.

Not that i am afraid of the cli, but this is just so convenient.
thanks