mjhjmtu

I’m trying to read some bytes out of /dev/urandom, keep only the ones I can type easily, and trim the result to 30 characters. I can’t figure out how to get the “only 30 characters” behavior when the data is coming from a pipe, though. I tried

cat /dev/urandom | tr -cd 'A-Za-z0-9' | cut -c -30

and

cut -c -30 /dev/urandom | tr -cd 'A-Za-z0-9' | cut -c -30

but these hang without displaying anything. On the other hand,

cut -c -30 /dev/urandom | tr -cd 'A-Za-z0-9'

outputs data endlessly (although it’s clearly been processed by tr because only the specified characters appear in the output).

In general, how can I read a certain number of characters (or bytes) from a pipe and then close the pipe?

cut will read the input until end-of-file, and cut a part out of each line. With the two first commands, you don't see anything, since tr removes any newlines, and so cut never sees a full line to process. In the last, the tr again removes newlines so you don't see how nicely cut kept the lines to a certain length.

Assuming your head utility supports the -c <characters> option, you could use it to get a fixed number of bytes. If it doesn't, use dd. (dd bs=1 count=NNN < /dev/urandom)

So, this would produce 32 alphanumerics (and a trailing newline):

tr -cd 'A-Za-z0-9' < /dev/urandom | head -c32 ; echo

Though, just out of principle, that's a bit of a waste since the tr tosses away about 3/4 or the raw input bytes. It might be better to pass the raw data from urandom to something like base64 or anything that produces a hex dump.

One simple way to make anything into readable characters:

$ head -c30 /dev/urandom | base64
nkGmuXgY/1OfNz8i/t3MsVe/5Q0z18AKotV3oJRW