On Sat, 5 Oct 2002, Peter Leftwich wrote: > I was sorting through my /usr/X11R6/bin/startx text-file and noticed: > > mcookie=`dd if=/dev/urandom bs=16 count=1 2>/dev/null | hexdump -e \\"%08x\\"` > > I started playing around with `cat /dev/urandom` and `head -1 /dev/urandom` > so my question is... How can I use the head -1 method and change the output > into just [A-Za-z0-9] and no spaces or punctuation? And specify length?
Why head -1...? /dev/random isn't very line oriented. Oh, well, nevermind. One way of doing what you want is: tr -cd a-zA-Z0-9 < /dev/urandom | dd bs=$len count=1 2>/dev/null Which will give you $len random bytes from the set a-zA-Z0-9 (it reads a lot more from /dev/urandom than it produces though). Another answer is, as always, "use perl" :-) $.02, /Mikko To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
