I was making a few files yesterday, which I needed to be filled with garbage. As I was working in good old BaSH, I was not in a mood to go to either C or any other language, as i/o redirection would have been a little complicated. Google came to the rescue, and I found this brilliant way:
~$: hexdump -n100 -e\"%u\" /dev/urandom > file.txt
Here’s how it works:
- /dev/random and /dev/urandom are the Linux Kernel’s random byte generators. The first is the better one, however it requires a lot of keyboard/mouse activity on the system to give a good output, and is only meant for use when security is of the essence. This would include SSH key generations, and other cryptographic work. For our purpose, urandom is sufficient.
- hexdump will convert the random binary data that /dev/random gives, into various formats. Here, we use the -e switch to convert it into ASCII characters (specified through %u quoted and escaped). -n100 limits the number of characters that the hexdump reads from /dev/urandom to 100. Check out the man page of hexdump for further options.
- The last bit redirects the output to the file specified.
There you go! A simple way to fill files with garbage. One brilliant, but potentially harmfull use of this can be to pipe this output to netcat, and create a heavy traffic on your LAN, which is pure garbage. Find out more if you wish to do that. :wink:
By the way, if you just need a random number, you can use the shell variable $RANDOM to give you a random number, each time it’s accessed. This can be useful to create pseudo-random lock files in /tmp for a script that you might need locks in.