Question

I am trying to generate a random text file on my macbook from terminal. What I am trying is that:

tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 < /dev/urandom | head -c100 > RandomFile.txt

but im getting

tr: Illegal byte sequence

What am i doing wrong?

Answer 1

Set this environment variable and you should be good to go:

setenv LC_ALL C

The answer for which I found on this page.

And with that environment variable in place, I see a nicely formatted output:

tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 < /dev/urandom | head -c100
Kk4kfjR3O0UraMpfTGicGvYCziFClJQUTO3zCXdo05RTxEUigqPXTkjtiGOsTsaNyqNR3rX2dsmPlHkSdqO5qWBTmIFIYezsekWT[~]:;