I am looking for a command to create multiple (thousands of) files containing at least 1KB of random data.
For example,
Name size
file1.01 2K
file2.02 3K
file3.03 5K
etc.
How can I create many files like this?
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What did you mean by “exclusive”? It doesn't make sense in context, so you probably used the wrong word.– Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'May 1, 2015 at 21:54
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I meant that files can not have the same content.– charlesMay 2, 2015 at 10:59
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So, exclusive would have meant unique.– somehumeFeb 28, 2019 at 22:09
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6 Answers
Since you don't have any other requirements, something like this should work:
#! /bin/bash
for n in {1..1000}; do
dd if=/dev/urandom of=file$( printf %03d "$n" ).bin bs=1 count=$(( RANDOM + 1024 ))
done
(this needs bash at least for {1..1000}).
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2This needs
bashfor numerous reasons, including$((…))and$RANDOM. Even$(…)might not exist in every shell. May 7, 2015 at 21:30 -
2@G-Man, in any case, none of those features are specific to
bashnor did they originate inbash({1..1000}comes fromzsh,for n in...; doneand variable expansion comes from the Bourne shell,$(...),$((...))and$RANDOMcome ksh). The features that are not POSIX are{1..1000},$RANDOMand/dev/urandom. Mar 3, 2017 at 13:46 -
1If you wanted 1..1000 to be constant-width you need
"%04d"in which casebashorzshcan do{0001..1000}with noprintfMar 3, 2017 at 16:32 -
1Additional feature: I need a way to spread these files over lots of randomly named nested subdirectories.– stuFeb 14, 2018 at 18:09
A variation with seq, xargs, dd and shuf:
seq -w 1 10 | xargs -n1 -I% sh -c 'dd if=/dev/urandom of=file.% bs=$(shuf -i1-10 -n1) count=1024'
Explanation as requested per comments:
seq -w 1 10 prints a sequence of numbers from 01 to 10
xargs -n1 -I% executes the command sh -c 'dd ... % ...' for each sequence number replacing the % with it
dd if=/dev/urandom of=file.% bs=$(shuf ...) count=1024 creates the files feeded from /dev/urandom with 1024 blocks with a blocksize of
shuf -i1-10 -n1 a random value from 1 to 10
answered May 1, 2015 at 19:23
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This creates 10 files with random size. Change "10" to the number of files wanted.– NayJan 15, 2019 at 22:38
This uses a single pipeline and seems fairly fast, but has the limitation that all of the files are the same size
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1024 count=10240 | split -a 4 -b 1k - file.
Explanation: Use dd to create 10240*1024 bytes of data; split that into 10240 separate files of 1k each (names will run from 'file.aaaa' through 'file.zzzz')
This will create 15 files each contains 1MB of random data:
for i in {001..015}; do head -c 1M </dev/urandom >randfile$i; done
You can do something like this:
#!/bin/bash
filecount=0
while [ $filecount -lt 10000 ] ; do
filesize=$RANDOM
filesize=$(($filesize+1024))
base64 /dev/urandom |
head -c "$filesize" > /tmp/file${filecount}.$RANDOM
((filecount++))
done
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I tried doing this but not worked. You might want to explain the parameters. :)– charlesMay 2, 2015 at 10:54
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Similar to lcd047's answer (it works with bash, even git bash on Windows), with the addition that the names are also randomized and of 1MB in size (might be more efficient disk-wise):
#! /bin/bash
s=$(hostname).$(pwd).${RANDOM}
for n in {1..1000}; do
x=$( printf %04d "$n" )
dd if=/dev/urandom of=$(echo "${x}.$(date +%s).${s}" | sha256sum -z | awk '{print $1}')$( printf %03d "$n" ).bin bs=1 count=1048576
done
