Creating a set of random numbers from the command line


This past weekend I was doing some database testing and needed to generate some random numbers to populate a table. My typical go-to utility for generating one random number is head piped to od and tr:

$ head -c 8 /dev/urandom | od -An -t x | tr -d ' '

3a366d317245d2ed
`

This works well and can be aded to a loop to get more than one
number. But I was curious if there was a native Linux utility
available to do this work. A quick poke through the Linux man pages
turned up the coreutils shuf utility:

$ `man -k random`

pwmake (1) - simple tool for generating random relatively easily pronounceable passwords shuf (1) - generate random permutations sslrand (1ssl) - generate pseudo-random bytes systemd-random-seed (8) - Load and save the system random seed at boot and shutdown systemd-random-seed.service (8) - Load and save the system random seed at boot and shutdown tc-red (8) - Random Early Detection


This was exactly what I was after. You can use the "-i" option
to indicate the random number range and "-n" to control how
many numbers are returned:

$ ` shuf -i 1-10000000 -n 5`

6174420 3403304 6024195 8451479 9210890


Super cool utility!
This article was posted by on 2019-11-06 14:57:26 -0500 -0500