Question

If i need x amount of characters to test my program, is there a way of generating them quickly with terminal in linux? or in python?
for example I want to test if my program breaks when I enter 80 characters. But instead of writing 80 characters I want to be able to just generate 80 characters in terminal and then copy paste it to my program (or pipeline it etc).
I tried doing:

>>> for item in range (1,80):
...     print "x",

It works but it prints x with spaces inbetween which would be more than 80 characters

Answer 1

Does it have to be ‘x’s? For a random string you can use this from the shell

$ dd if=/dev/urandom count=80 bs=1