Posted: . At: 10:31 AM. This was 4 years ago. Post ID: 14112
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Very interesting and strange bash trick with ls.

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This is a very interesting bash trick I found using ls. This runs the ls command with random parameters. This is not very useful, but interesting nonetheless.

4.4 Tue Mar 03 jason@Yog-Sothoth 0: $ ls -`cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'hula' | head --bytes 1`

This is another example, this does work very well.

4.4 Tue Mar 03 jason@Yog-Sothoth 0: $ ls -`cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'hula' | head --bytes 3`
total 24
drwxr-xrwx+  2 jason jason  4096 Mar  3 10:07 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 52 jason jason 12288 Mar  3 10:06 ..
-rw-r--rw-   1 jason jason  6590 Aug 28  2019 user.ltx

I do not know why you would use this, but this is an interesting trick nonetheless. I just wish I could use tr without cat. But what can you do?

Using the tr command like this, all of the letters are jumbled up into a random string.

tr -dc 'hula'

This could be used to generate a very complicated password though…

4.4 Tue Mar 03 jason@Yog-Sothoth 0: $ cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc '[a-zA-Z0-9]' | head --bytes 36
qXKM8ZHm2wD5smNtRCtj7M0pilxGrBti5yFX

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