Generate random password with special characters on Solaris

You can get cryptographic-quality random bytes from /dev/urandom. (This exists since Solaris 9. It also exists on Linux.) This includes unprintable characters, so you need to remove those. The following command extracts 10 random printable, non-space ASCII characters.

</dev/urandom tr -dc '!-~' | dd ibs=1 obs=1 count=10

I don't recommend using special characters in passwords. They don't make passwords more secure. What makes the security of a password is its entropy. A 10-character password has 10×log₂(94) ≈ 65.5 bits of entropy. You can get the same amount of entropy from 9 arbitrary bytes and encode them as you wish, for example as hexadecimal.

</dev/urandom dd ibs=1 obs=1 count=9 | od -tx1 -An | tr -d ' '

Or as Base64, which is shorter.

</dev/urandom dd ibs=1 obs=1 count=9 | uuencode -m - | sed -n 2p

If there's some hard constraint that “passwords must contain at least one special character” (which is a questionable way to make passwords selected by average humans more secure, and it completely wrong for randomly generated passwords), then you can't simply use a random password, because there's a chance that it'll happen not to contain any character in a required class. If you reject passwords that don't meet the constraint, you're reducing the security of the password. Instead, make the password longer, e.g.

</dev/urandom dd ibs=1 obs=1 count=9 | uuencode -m - | sed '2!d; s/$/-Aa1/'

If you need the password to be memorable, that's a different problem. The best memorable passwords are passphrases.

You have perl in Solaris, it helps:

perl -e 'print[0..9,a..z,A..Z]->[rand 62]for 1..10'

With special characters it will be:

perl -e 'print [0..9,a..z,A..Z,qw{- _ / & ?}]->[rand 67]for 0..10'