From Adrien Lebre, who seems to be having fun working on kDFS:
$ dd if=/dev/random of=file bs=1024 count=2 0+2 records in 0+2 records out 256 bytes (256 B) copied, 0.000705717 s, 363 kB/s $ ls -l file -rw-r--r-- 1 lucas lucas 256 2008-02-08 17:53 file
Can be easily explained using strace:
open("/dev/random", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 0 [..] open("file", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC|O_LARGEFILE, 0666) = 1 [..] read(0, "p(\361\241,\360-\330~M\245y\10=\274U\201c\207\v\336a\273"..., 1024) = 128 write(1, "p(\361\241,\360-\330~M\245y\10=\274U\201c\207\v\336a\273"..., 128) = 128 read(0, "\362,LW5l.?\242\22\252\223\206\375\10\326\335\316\374\372"..., 1024) = 128 write(1, "\362,LW5l.?\242\22\252\223\206\375\10\326\335\316\374\372"..., 128) = 128 close(0) = 0 close(1) = 0
Bad dd! no cookie for you!
Usually /dev/urandom is good enough.
looks like the link to Adrien’s page is broken…