Create Your Own QR Codes on Linux

January 30, 2011 by


To be exact, a QR Code can hold up to 4,296 alphanumeric characters. There are a number of websites available that you can use to create QR Codes, but why do that when you can take care of it on your own computer?

There's a small program available for Linux called qrencode that you can use to create QR Codes and save them as PNG images. You can download the source tarball from the qrencode developer's website or you can install it from your distro's repositories. You can install it in Ubuntu with:

sudo apt-get install qrencode

qrencode is a simple command line utility. In its simplest form, it can be invoked like this.

qrencode -o hello.png 'Hello, World! This is my first QR Code.'

By default, qrencode makes the dots 3 pixels in size. You can change this size with the -s switch. If you'd like to make your image a little bigger, try a pixel size of 5.

qrencode -o hello_big.png -s 5 'Hello, World! This is my first QR Code.'

If you don't provide a string at the end of the command, qrencode will accept the encode string from standard input. You can easily enter multiple lines of text in this mode. When you're done, just hit [Enter] and then hit [Ctrl]+[D].

QR Code

Have fun making your QR Codes.



6 Responses to “Create Your Own QR Codes on Linux”

  1. erickjohncuevas says:


  2. franky says:


  3. JohnTheRipper says:

    thx for posting it might be very usefull

  4. Rafael says:


  5. Onray says:


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