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If you ran the following, what would happen?

cat /dev/random > ~/randomFile # don't run

Would it be written until the drive runs out of space, or would the system see a problem with this and stop it (like with an infinite symlink loop)?

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I just wanted to add that concatenating random into devices was worth a few hours of fun in my youth. The framebuffer and sound card resulted in noise and the disk drive required me to do a low level reformat... good times. – Bob Roberts Feb 5 at 16:40
OT: 'executable /dev/dsp? sounds like fun' – sendmoreinfo Feb 5 at 21:04
@BobRoberts I has similar adventures, with similar outcomes. I also used to ssh into colleagues' linux workstations and cat DTMF tones to the internal speaker, then play a busy tone, so it sounded like their PC was trying to FAX something out. Ah, good times. – Tim Kennedy Feb 6 at 15:59
@TimKennedy how do you do that? Is there a /dev/ice for the 30mm audio jack? – tkbx Feb 6 at 16:41
@tkbx well, i'm dating myself, but back in the day you could cat a file to /dev/audio, and if it was a sound file (.wav) it would get played. – Tim Kennedy May 1 at 15:24

1 Answer

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It writes until the disk is full (usually there is still some space reserved for the root user). But as the pool of random data is limited, this could take a while.

If you need a certain amount of random data, use dd. For 1MB:

dd if=/dev/random iflag=fullblock of=$HOME/randomFile bs=1M count=1

Other possibilities are mentioned in answers to a related question.

In almost all cases it is better to use /dev/urandom instead. It does not block if the kernel gets out of entropy, but uses a pseudorandom generator to get arbitrary random data out of collected entropy.

Installing haveged speeds up /dev/random.

EDIT: dd needs the fullblock option as /dev/random (in opposite of /dev/urandom) can return incomplete blocks if the entropy pool is empty.

If your dd does not support units, write them out:

dd if=/dev/random iflag=fullblock of=$HOME/randomFile bs=1048576 count=1
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100 MiB of high-quality random data is a bit much... you should get a few bytes to seed some high-quality pseudo random number generator, like the Mersenne twister. If the application is critical (in a cryptographic sense) you must go and read up on the matter, and perhaps hire an expert. – vonbrand Feb 5 at 14:52
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@vonbrand No, reading 100MB from /dev/urandom is fine, there's no reason not to do it. And do not use a Mersenne twister to do crypto. And don't use /dev/random on Linux. – Gilles Feb 5 at 21:46
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@jofel: No, the output of /dev/urandom is fine for cryptographic use. Do not use /dev/random. – Thomas Pornin Feb 5 at 22:12
@Gilles, maybe I'm loosing it... I agree with everything you say, ans can't see where I said anything different. – vonbrand Feb 5 at 22:13
@Gilles & vonbrand: Thanks for you comments, I improved my answer (now only 1MB in the example, /dev/urandom recommended). – jofel Feb 6 at 10:02
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