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If you want to do it really quickly

    openssl enc -aes-256-ctr -pbkdf2 -pass pass:"$(date '+%s')" < /dev/zero | dd of=/home/myrandomfile bs=1M count=1024
Almost all CPUs have AES native instructions so you'll be able to produce pseudorandom junk really fast. Even my old system will produce it at about 3Gb/s. Much faster than urandom can go.


That's very cool. Sadly running that exact command gets an incomplete file and error "error writing output file". It suggests adding iflag=fullblock (to dd). Running that makes a file of the correct size. But still gives "error writing output file". I suppose that occurs because dd breaks the pipe.


Weird, I could have sworn that used to work, maybe I wrote the notes down wrong.

Easiest alternative I guess is to pipe through head. It still grumbles, but it does work

    openssl enc -aes-256-ctr -pbkdf2 -pass pass:"$(date '+%s')" < /dev/zero | head -c 10M > foo




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