Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm trying to write a script that generates a file of varying size filled with random text and am having some difficulties.

The major problems are that I'm limited to csh and a lot of the systems I have to run this on don't have a /dev/random (so a wrapper around the dd if=/dev/random or dd if=/dev/zero commands won't work).

This script is going to be run on varying UNIX operating systems and, as I've said, the lowest common denominator is csh. I'd like to make this as cross-platform as possible.

Anyone have any recommendations?

Could you provide a bit more information? Such as a use for such a script.

Sure. I'm going to use it to generate a file to ftp to/from multiple systems for network benchmarking.

I already have all the ftp parts automated, I just can't figure out how to generate the file dynamically before ftp kicks in (I don't actually want to keep the files, they just need to be around for the ftp's).

Being limited to csh and not having /dev/random hurts a bit.

Sorry bro, sound's too fishy to me. I don't see a need to create such files dynamically for 'benchmarking'. If I'm wrong then I wish you luck.

cat /bin/* | dd

or something like that.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'fishy' but just because *you* don't see a need for it doesn't mean it isn't legitimate. I really don't want to leave 100-300MB files laying around for when my management gets a wild hair to see how our network connections are doing.

In the future, a simple "I don't know" would suffice instead of calling into question my purpose.

Someone else wish to give me a hand?

No need to get bent out of shape.