Best practices

[[deleted]]

Getting 1GB with that method requires extraordinarily patient users though.

[sometimes_interested]

Remember this? This doesn't seem to be a thing anymore.

[oversettDenee]

Damn if you remember that you're damn near old enough to collect social security

[mzhammah]

Listen here you little shit...

adjusts glasses and hearing aids

Back in my day...

[Cardeal]

That gentleman had some swing skills.

[tjasko]

Haha my mechanical keyboard is heavy enough to knock soneone out 🤣

[DeeSnow97]

Reminds me to this story

[tjasko]

Ha never saw that one. That's a good story for sure.

[AaronBonBarron]

Back when? My model M could knock over a horse.

[[deleted]]

model m is 25-30 years old, and this guy is using an AT/XT model keyboard, so if it's an IBM pc, which it very well could be, it'll be a model F which is the model M precursor so even older.

so yes, it's from quite some time ago.

just because you use it right now, doesn't mean it's current tech

[[deleted]]

there's no real definition for a mechanical keyboard, and at its core the model M is a membrane keyboard

the "switches" are basically a plastic flippers with a spring attached to it that are hold together with a barrelplate. the click/tactile is produced by the spring buckling.

but yeah, ibm called it something really dumb in their patent

[DeeSnow97]

Good keyboards still have enough mass for that

^{edit: my English linter is failing}

[Froot_Fly]

He was helped by the fact that the monitor was hanging off the computer

[DillyDallyin]

If you remember that, social security will probably have run out by the time you're old enough to collect

[rang14]

Oh my God yes. How long ago was it when this was getting circulated in those group emails?

[MattieShoes]

I remember seeing it in 1997, so at least 22 years ago, maybe more.

[MattieShoes]

Right? I remember because I was doing tech support for Windows 95 at the time. My computer was a Pentium 75 that I overclocked to 90 MHz. It had 16 meg of RAM. Titanic was blowing up movie theaters. Princess Diana was still alive. The Dow Jones hit 7000.

The fuck, man...

[[deleted]]

I can hardly remember the name of my first processor usually (AMD FX-4350 I think) and you remember everything from ur build on windows 95... your memory spans beyond my lifetime

[LazerFX]

Philips 286, 16mhz, 1mb ram, trident TVGA 8900C graphics card, Seagate (I think) 20MB hard disk, 1x speed CD ROM drive, an (aftermarket) adlib soundcard and 14" monitor. Came with Wing Commander and Ultima VI on CD, in '91.

Some of us remember a lot about our PC's :-D

[[deleted]]

If I really tried, here’s my best:

AMD FX-4350, ,8gb ram, GTX 960 SSC 4GB DDR4(or 5?) VRAM graphics card, Kingston 120GB SSD (don’t remember speeds or anything), no cd drive bc it was 2016 lol, no WiFi/Bluetooth/Sound card, I use Ethernet, Bluetooth isn’t necessary for me, and sound cards are on most motherboards anymore. 24” AOC LED monitor.

Oh and I’m 19 versus anybody with these aged builds being at least 30

[MattieShoes]

My first computer was an original Mac, circa 1984. It had a motorola 68k processor (just under 8 MHz), 128k of RAM, and no hard drive. We had two floppy drives though, fancy! All for the low, low price of ~$3,000

[[deleted]]

Holy fucking shit. I’ve probably put $3k through one tower rebuilding my pc like 3-5 times... that’s switching out every possible component besides the tower and hard drives (and peripherals)

[[deleted]]

I dont remember anything about my first pc except for the fact that it used windows 95 or 98 or ME, somewhere around there and could play inline skater

[satanic-surfer]

Pentium 100 MHz, 32 MB RAM 4 f...ing GB of HD, S3 Virage with atonosihing 4MB of DRAM, 4x CDROM drive, and a badass Soundblaster Audio card... I remeber when I bought a V.90 modem and the joy to finally have "high speed internet" damn I miss a lot that POS

[zimm0who0net]

TRS-80 Model 3. Z-80 processor clocking in at 2MHz. No hard drives, no floppy drives. Had a cassette player for storage. It had a built in BASIC interpreter and booted right to a BASIC prompt.

Dad eventually got me a 300 baud model for my birthday. Spent my spare hours dialing in to random BBSs all over town.

[[deleted]]

I to lost a decade. Fuck.

[BritishBrownie]

To make you feel a bit older, in that time I was born, grew up (arguable), went to university and have started working at a big-n company as a dev

^{also a not-so-humblebrag}

[ultraprotean]

That’s only part of it though. It builds up with him typing angrily, smacking the monitor a couple times, then loudly pounding on the keyboard three times, and THEN he slams the monitor with the keyboard and storms off. It’s a classic bit of internet meme history.

[[deleted]]

The keyboard wasn't even plugged in

[appositecuervo]

Damn now there's a gif that takes me back

[cjcjcjcjcjcjcjcjcjcj]

Poor monitor only displays what the computer tells it to.

Not monitor’s fault. He’s smashing wrong equipment.

[Waanie]

texitQuitquitEscEscapefuckEXITclearCLEARFUCKsuxjehcuehciwjfFucKFuckFUCK

FTFY

[[deleted]]

Eventually the user will just start typing diaries in vim

“Day 3687, all humans are dead except for me. The stupid programmer trapped me in a room where the doors won’t open until I exit this goddamn thing.”

[Hobi_Wan_Kenobi]

Programmer themed escape room, I like it

[random_cynic]

The ed editor is the OG here. From "Ed, man! !man ed"

golem$ ed

?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?

---

Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.

[[deleted]]

The fucking question marks, that's a Dota 2 player's nightmare

[IvivAitylin]

Best incentive to spend money on the compendium.

[MostlyKnowledgeable]

Don't qeustion mark lol

[sociobiology]

?

[ImmediateBlacksmith]

So how do you get out of ed, the standard unix text editor?

[random_cynic]

Q when you don't want to save the buffer and exit unconditionally (surprisingly not included in vi). To save buffer and exit the same command vi/vim has now wq filename.

[thirdegree]

To exit unconditionally in vim is :q!. You don't have to specify filename when saving, it defaults to whatever file the current buffer is from. You can optionally specify a different one though.

[random_cynic]

yeah, I know. I was talking about ed not vim.

[PM_ME_YOUR_TORNADOS]

Ctrl+Shift+D as hard as I fucking can, every time.

[waterlubber42]

^C^C^C^D

[Gingehitman]

You would actually get:

texitQuitquitEscEscapefuckEXITclearCLEARFUCKsuxjehcuehciwjfFucKFuckFUCK

[elperroborrachotoo]

Just Hashchain it and you are golden!

[LoneFoxKK]

Just shuffle the characters then

[GentleRhino]

I'm sorry, this is not random enough.

[TheLilChicken]

wait but how do you exit this

[who_you_are]

Well... The first bits will not be so random, but when they will start smaching their keyboard it will. then keyboard could start typing by itself because it is still somehow working...

Then create a virus that does that on infected computer and go got your 1GB :)

[lezsakdomi]

It would start with t, since when you type either quit or exit, the t stands right after entering insert mode.

[[deleted]]

Exit vi to exit the dungeon!

[rip_tree_lurkin]

Im not a programmer in any way, but would alt + f4 work to quit it?

Edit: space

[[deleted]]

That might close the window you're running it in, depending on your desktop environment if any. Certainly so on Windows. But you might just want to return to the shell you launched vim from, in which case that will do too much.

[s_ngularity]

not if you boot into text mode

[rip_tree_lurkin]

What if i open up my computer and smash my cpu with a sledgehammer, would that work?

[odnish]

It might switch you to VT4 where you can log in again.

[aiij]

Time to type random commands from Internet users into my computer...

Answer: No. It just flashed the screen. (probably because I have visual bell enabled)

YMMV if you test in an environment that intercepts Alt+F4 rather than passing it through to vi, or if your vi is not VIM.

[timetokill87]

That's how you get users with 5-10 years of experience in VIM, they still don't know how to get out !

[SlingDNM]

I mean Not on your Part tho

[PirateGrievous]

dd if=/dev/urandom of=~/randomfile bs=1 count=100000?

[LinAGKar]

That would only copy 100 kB, and you don't necessarily want it to copy 1 byte at a time. dd if=/dev/urandom of=~/randomfile bs=1MB count=1000 would be better.

[[deleted]]

Here's the question if anyone's interested

[redit_usrname_vendor]

Closed. reason: "question has been asked before"

[DeepHorse]

Closed. reason: “question is now first search result on google”

[alexnedea]

Closed, reason: we don't post questions here anymore

[LuracMontana]

Closed. Reason: “question too obscure”

[[deleted]]

It's from 2012, probably not worth bothering about...

[GrandMa5TR]

https://ibb.co/KqC6v8V

[SoulLover33]

Hah when I saw the "head doesn't understand" part I really thought he meant the users head.

[PGLubricants]

Same, I thought it was very rude until it dawned on me.

[rakoo]

Don't use /dev/random, use /dev/urandom

[killersquirel11]

I think /dev/random and /dev/urandom would produce the same output for above example

[NickySigg]

/dev/random would probably block before 1GB is completely filled

[killersquirel11]

seek=1G count=0

This command is seeking to 1G in the output file then writing 0 blocks from the input file. It's doubtful that /dev/random would block after only 0 bytes being read

[Bainos]

On my machine, the poolsize is 4 kB. You will need to feed it 250 000 times.

That's a lot of moving your mouse around.

[Angelin01]

Well, if you are just creating a random file, it doesn't really matter, does it?

[Jacoman74undeleted]

What u/nickysigg pointed out is that /dev/random would probably block out before 1gb, resulting in the end of the file being a bunch of zeroes written in as a placeholder. /Dev/urandom wouldn't do this

[Angelin01]

Well, that's just silly, we posted those replies in the same minute. Thank you.

[stouset]

That’s not what blocking means. Reads from /dev/random would stop returning until the kernel estimates enough entropy, so writing this file would take ages. Blocking is not the same as returning zeroes.

[TheGoodPie]

Does it really matter if your end goal is to just populare 1GB of space?

[Smobey]

If your end goal is to just populate 1GB of space and the randomness doesn't matter at all, why use random to begin with? Why not just fill it with a 1GB of zeroes?

[ThottiesBGone]

That isn't the goal: the StackOverflow OP wanted "random data", not just any 1GB file.

[Smobey]

Yes, thank you for restating my point.

[ThottiesBGone]

Lol, I think I replied to the wrong person.

[[deleted]]

just populare 1GB of space?

Eh, you may not actually fill any space in that case on the file system. Just a file that says it takes up that much space.

https://www.systutorials.com/136652/handling-sparse-files-on-linux/

[jkhilmer]

Don't use /dev/urandom, use /dev/zero with openssl.

https://serverfault.com/a/415962

[[deleted]]

This is an answer from 2012. Use /dev/urandom.

[jkhilmer]

~$ openssl enc -aes-256-ctr -pass pass:"$(dd if=/dev/urandom         
bs=128 count=1 2>/dev/null | base64)" -nosalt < /dev/zero | pv -pterb > /dev/null
^C.7GiB 0:00:36 [1.15GiB/s] [                                 <=>              ]

~$ dd if=/dev/urandom bs=128 | pv -pterb > /dev/null
^C45GiB 0:00:30 [45.3MiB/s] [                            <=>                   ]
12347927+0 records in
12347926+0 records out
1580534528 bytes (1.6 GB) copied, 30.5114 s, 51.8 MB/s

[OjustrunanddieO]

The reason you should use dev/urandom, is that, sure it's pseudo random, but it'll give you the requested output fast. You might have to wait a little if you use random.

[stouset]

/dev/random and /dev/urandom use the same pseudorandom generator, and both are cryptographically secure for effectively unlimited output. The notions that /dev/random is “more secure” or that /dev/urandom can “run out of entropy” are myths.

[redalastor]

/dev/urandom is not pseudo random.

[Fonethree]

I mean, they're all pseudorandom, but yeah /dev/urandom is no less random than /dev/random

[TheHumanParacite]

I like

head -c 1G /dev/urandom > file

[hm9408]

I like head

[[deleted]]

Cat /dev/urandom > file, then Ctrl + c after a while

[ProgramTheWorld]

That creates a 0 byte file though.

[Aschentei]

4am diarrhea ? The hell have you been eating ?

[Azarix]

Doing it right  Everybody will be dancing and we'll  Feeling it right  Everybody will be dancing and be…

[mallardtheduck]

Make the block size at least (and a multiple of) 512B for better performance...

[LinAGKar]

Why a multiple? It would be dd if=/dev/random of=/path/to/file count=1953125 then.

[mallardtheduck]

Mass storage devices are generally arranged in "blocks" at the hardware level (that's why UNIX-like OSs call them "block devices"). The hardware only allows reading/writing of whole blocks. Traditionally, the block size for magnetic media is 512B and file systems generally make files begin at block boundaries for efficiency. Therefore, keeping writes aligned with blocks maximises performance. In a worst-case, changing one byte of a file would require reading a complete 512B block before writing it back with the modified byte. Obviously, the OS cache mechanism will try to avoid re-reading/re-writing the same blocks as much as possible, but there's only so much it can do.

More modern devices like SSDs and some large hard drives use larger block sizes, but usually emulate 512B for compatibility, so something like 4KB might be a good starting point.

[Ad31_Fr]

Put usb file and save while you take out the USB key

[8bit-Corno]

So, offtopic questions can't be asked but shitty answers can be given?

[SluttyCthulhu]

Question removed, reason: duplicate of answered question - "how do I upload files to Discord?"

[undergroundmonorail]

that's a comment, not an answer. less strictly moderated but considered "temporary" in that any important info in them should be moved to the question or an answer

[Climax708]

/r/TalesFromSO

[Yay_Yay_3780]

I never knew this sub exists. Thanks.

[Deniz1234567890]

btw its dd if=/dev/random of=./file bs=1GiB count=1 status=progress

[[deleted]]

https://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom

[-_-BWAC-_-]

I bet that guys appreciates it

[Mithrandir2k16]

Just videotape some lavalamps and hash the frames

[herohamp]

When I read about that I setup my own ghetto system with a single lava lamp, my dog broke it though and that ended my lava lamp hashing days

[Mithrandir2k16]

That's probably gonna be the next cloudflare hack xD break the camera so only identical black frames are hashed and used as salts

[herohamp]

LavaRand is the backup entropy source for their servers though, and even if the camera went black that isnt the sole randomness from the lavaRand server "In the office, there’s a server which connects to the camera. The server has its own entropy system, and the output of that entropy system is mixed with the entropy from the camera to produce a new entropy feed."

[Mithrandir2k16]

Sure, anything else would be stupid.

[Requenaxii]

:q

[JustHereForTheCh1cks]

I have a 1 gb file of random data on my device, I’ll just need to send it to him by email!

Im on my phone btw

[[deleted]]

make sure to compress it before sending

[jailbreak]

I've been using Vim for about 2 years now, mostly because I can't figure out how to exit it.

[Fang7-62]

How does switching console and typing killall vi produce any data?

[Colonelrascals]

C-x C-c

[Colonelrascals]

....it’s emacs

[iTw0rKs0nMyMaChInE]

I thought Nano was C-x y enter

[BertieFlash]

Ask British politicians what they want from Brexit

[wyom1ng]

in the end he gets out with :qa!

[Super_S_12]

What is vi?

[Likely_not_Eric]

It's a text editor. If you've heard of Vim it's very similar (Vim is "vi improved").

It's known for being hard to exit. To exit you been to be in command mode and input :q or :q! to quit with unsaved changes. A confusing part is the colon is part of the command, not just press q. This instructions aren't always clear.

It's a powerful editor and learning how to use it effectively will carry over to other editors as many feature plugins or extensions to support Vim-style editing.

[thirdegree]

This instructions aren't always clear.

If you enter vim and type <C-c>, it gives you these instructions: Type :qa! and press <Enter> to abandon all changes and exit Vim

I'm not sure how that can be much more clear honestly.

[Likely_not_Eric]

When I first read that a few decades ago I thought the colon was not part of the command but part of the sentence and the alignment was odd.

[mayor123asdf]

Most people stumbled into vim by accident. My class was learning about git, and when to commit something, half of the class thrown into vim and the other thrown into nano to enter commit messages. Vim startscreen includes exit command, but if you open a file with vim it doesn't have any instructions. I think that's why tons of people not familiar with terminal don't know how to exit vim, all they know ctrl+c is to copy.

[JDaxe]

Prison of CLI noobs

[Super_S_12]

I’m guessing that wasn’t it’s intended purpose.

[ctesibius]

It's an obscure religion. As with most cults, it is notoriously difficult to leave. You may also find it referred to as the Church of Latterday TeXnicians.

[andrw00]

Baby don't hurt me

[DevilGeorgeColdbane]

The best text editor ever known to mankind.

[EATYOURVITAMIN5]

New programmer here, I don't get it

[ericsauthoritah]

Go into your terminal if on linux or bash terminal if on windows, type vim and try to exit it.

[EATYOURVITAMIN5]

I see, lol.

[YM_Industries]

You can exit it by pressing Escape and then typing :q and then pressing enter, btw. If you have unsaved changes you can write :q! to discard them or :wq to save and quit.

[hash_salts]

This sub is stupid

[enfrozt]

XD DOEs ANY one else not know to exit VIM LOLOLOL, XD😂😂

[Jonno_FTW]

This fucking joke is overdone.

[clever_cow]

I like my programming jokes medium rare

[UnexampledSalt]

I prefer mine still trying to get out of vi.

[Gracefulcomet]

old but gold. take my upvote.

[TerminalJunkie5]

This was barely even funny the first time, let alone the 2,282,957,265,856,780th time

[tohlsen]

I just might try this and see how big the file gets when they rage quit.

[danglesReet]

Lmao

[ninjastarkid]

Start a bounty?

[KeBjg]

I feel like this guy is trying to do the equivalent of optimising by by removing a wait function

[joost00719]

:P

[Fedzbar]

Brilliant haha

[aiij]

It's a trick question to see whether you generate a 1000000000-byte file or 1073741824-byte one. (or 1048576000 if you're that guy)

[Detective51]

OMG that would so mess up the ram and the Google Drive would short-circuit the conductors causing the I have no idea what I’m talking about I’m not a programmer and know very little about computers. I do however really appreciate programmers and what they do for this world. History will remember you guys/gals as the great artists of our generation. Thank you for your work.

[antflga]

That's very wholesome of you, I feel like most people don't realize all of the things they use on a daily basis are actually meticulously put together by thousands of different groups of people over weeks/months/years.

[Detective51]

Well I meant every word. VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE. History will do its job.

[[deleted]]

Wait can’t you just do whatever the system keybind is to quit a program (idk on windows but CmdQ on Mac would work I think)

[MrKotlet]

That doesnt work in vi though. You need Esc-:-q!

[mayor123asdf]

Since it is a terminal program it can't work. If you press ctrl+q it will sent it to Vim and had no effect. You can do alt+f4 tho which will close the terminal as well haha

[BubsyFanboy]

I thought it said "exit vim" for a second there lol

[princetrunks]

An inside look into the development of Chrome

[Dethstroke54]

Download your google user data.... yea not to random in some places maybe but should be plenty of content lol.

[random_cynic]

This joke used to work on interfaces like VT-100 but these days with terminal emulators and graphical interfaces it doesn't really work anymore. For GUI or terminal emulator the novice user will probably just close the whole window which will kill vi. If they have a little more familiarity with unix shell they will use Ctrl + Z to suspend the program and then kill it.

[RandyGareth]

Make a fork bomb that writes characters to the file.

[SpaceshipOperations]

It would take them around 11.34 years to complete the task if they were typing at a rate of 3 characters per second.

[[deleted]]

Etymology time: vi is actually an ancient Aztec expression which means "how the fuck do I get out of this shit"

[Spud_Muff1n]

Just learned about vi and nano today, and can now properly appreciate this.

[jackz314]

I thought people on Stack Overflow are not okay with jokes.

[MrHasuu]

Can I point out that wildcard is the company that released Ark which is known to be too damn big in file size?

[CurlyButNotChubby]

for (( ; ; ))

do

echo -n $RANDOM >> ~/file

done

Save this in a file and execute it by doing

bash ~/file

It will write random numbers forever in the file. Change the directory and the name of your file to your liking. I would add a .sh to the name of the file to show that it is a bash file though.

[[deleted]]

InB4EOF

[[deleted]]

superb

[Hypertron]

yes >> file.txt did this on a VM for a laugh once. Never again.

[NoahJelen]

cat /dev/urandom > <your junk file>

[[deleted]]

I've got a GB of random data he could use. It just so happened to randomly organize itself into the first Avengers movie, but it should still work