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Today's entry in the "do one thing and do it well" sweepstakes is a nifty little utility I found just lying around on my FreeBSD system with an apropos random. I need some psuedorandom data to stick in large file and I figured I ought to be able to get it from the shell. Sure enough, jot was just what I wanted!
Need to think of a number between 1 and 10?
jot -r 1 1 10
Need an 80-character line of random printable characters?
jot -r -s "" -c 80 ! ~
You can do the same thing using ASCII codes to reference the range of characters:
jot -r -s "" -c 80 33 126
I suspect you can see how the above would be nice for testing scripts or generating Lorem Ipsum style filler. Of course, you can use a wider range of characters if you're not going to look at them on-screen, and that's very nice for filling up a file:
jot -r -s "" -c 1024 0 255 > foo
Voila! A nice, not-very-compressable 1k file!
Don't delay! Try a man jot at a shell prompt near you today!
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