Generate Word With Random Characters In Linux

Using following simple bash command we can generate words with random characters.

tr -dc a-z < /dev/urandom | head -c 10 | xargs

This will generate a word with 10 random characters (letter). The random characters will be from a-z.

To add other characters as seed, for eg: A-Z, run

tr -dc a-zA-Z < /dev/urandom | head -c 10 | xargs

As you might have figured out, you can add characters as parameters to tr command. And hence,

tr -dc a-zA-Z0-9 < /dev/urandom | head -c 10 | xargs

will generate words that will include digits as well.

Similarly we can include underscore or other symbols as

tr -dc a-zA-Z0-9_- < /dev/urandom | head -c 10 | xargs

To generate different number of characters we can change the parameter to head command. In all of the above examples value 10 was given and hence 10 characters word.

tr -dc a-zA-Z0-9_- < /dev/urandom | head -c 5 | xargs

will generate 5 random characters word.

We can even put this command in a script file and give number of characters as run time parameter.

#!/bin/bash
while :
do
tr -dc a-z < /dev/urandom | head -c ${1} | xargs
done

./scriptname numberOfCharacters

will produce infinite number of words with numberOfCharactersletter in each of them.

However the algorithm isn't very fast one.