I started following your RSS feed because of one of the python scripts you pulled out. I’m a python beginner, and I like looking at other folks’ methods. Then I realized your were an amateur operator, so those feeds were interesting, and THEN you pull out stuff like this. Truly amazing! Keep the good stuff coming!

Tnx
‘73
de W4BSD

tr -d -c A-Z < /dev/urandom |
dd ibs=10000 iflag=fullblock count=1 cbs=50 conv=unblock |
sed 's/\(.\{5\}\)/\1 /g; s/ $//;'

Trading a little efficiency for clarity,
one could replace the `dd` above with:

fold -w50 | head -n200

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]){
    int c, i, n=argc<2?10000:atoi(argv[1]);
    if(n<0) fprintf(stderr, "%s: %s?\n", argv[0], argv[1]), exit(1);
    FILE *f=fopen("/dev/urandom", "r");
    if(f==0) perror("/dev/urandom"), exit(1);
    for(i=0;i!=n;i++){
        do c=getc(f); while(c<’A’ || ‘Z’<c);
        putchar(c);
        if(i%5==4) putchar(i%50==49?’\n’:’ ‘);
    }
    if(i%50!=0) putchar(‘\n’);
    return 0;
}

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]){
int c, i, n=argc<2?10000:atoi(argv[1]);
if(n<0) fprintf(stderr, "%s: %s?\n", argv[0], argv[1]), exit(1);
FILE *f=fopen("/dev/urandom", "r");
if(f==0) perror("/dev/urandom"), exit(1);
for(i=0;i!=n;i++){
do c=getc(f); while(c<’A’ || ‘Z’<c);
putchar(c);
if(i%5==4) putchar(i%50==49?’\n’:’ ‘);
}
if(i%50!=0) putchar(‘\n’);
return 0;
}

(Hope this formats right.)

tr -d -c A-Z < /dev/urandom | fold -w 5 | xargs -n 10 echo | head -200

So that its the form-feed char, not the carriage-return 13, or line-feed 10 char?

Or is that in 12 in octal?

while (<>) {

anyhow, shared the challenge at lunch with other programmers. here is another solution.

perl -e ‘$limit=shift; $group=5; $i=0; while($i<$limit) { read STDIN, $b, 1; $o=ord $b; next if $o>234; print chr(65+($o % 26)), (++$i % $group ? “” : ” “) } print “\n”‘ 150 < /dev/urandom | fold -w 60

Truncate to the desired length… I am assuming you mean 50 non-space chars?

If you dislike sed you can try this abomination:

tr -d -c A-Z < /dev/urandom | fold -w 5 | tr '12' ' ' | fold -w 60

tr -d -c A-Z < /dev/urandom |
dd ibs=1 count=10000 |
od -cvw50 |
sed 's/^[0-7]* *//;s/ //g;s/…../& /g'

The trick is to find a command that doesn't look for newlines in its input; od is the obvious choice. Unfortunately od's -w flag is non-posix.

dd ibs=10000 doesn't actually work how you'd expect when its input is a pipe, for complicated reasons.

This code reads the standard input with the while () then converts each line to an array and interates over the array to pull out the characters we care about then when our array is full, print it out.

perl -e ‘my $limit = 10_000; my @cypher;while (){my @chars=split(undef, $_);for my $char (@chars){if ($char =~ m/[A-Z]/ ){push @cypher, $char;if($limit<=scalar(@cypher)){my $offest = 0;while(@cypher){for(1..10){print " ";for(1..5){print pop @cypher;}}print "\n";}exit;}}}}' < /dev/urandom

my $limit = 250; # ten lines of five groups of five
my @cypher; # where we put the plain text pad
while () { # read line by line from STDIN
my @chars = split(undef, $_); # split the line into a list of characters
#print “|”;
for my $char (@chars) {
if ($char =~ m/[A-Z]/ ) { # if the character is A-Z
push @cypher, $char;
#print “.”;
if ($limit <= scalar(@cypher)) {
#print "\n";
#print scalar(@cypher);
my $offest = 0;
while (@cypher) {
for (1..5) { # GROUP
print " ";
for (1..5) { #LETTERS
print pop @cypher;
}
}
print "\n";
}
exit;
}
}
}
#print scalar(@cypher)."\n";
}

tr -d -c A-Z < /dev/urandom | dd ibs=10000 count=1 | sed -e 's/\(.\{5\}\)/\1 /g' -e 's/\(.\{60\}\)/\1\n/g' | cut -c 1-59