Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 11:25:05 +0200 From: "mdff" <nospam@mgedv.net> To: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: cat /dev/urandom Message-ID: <20050728092506.096B3186800@mgedv.at> In-Reply-To: <20050726183029.M97284@neptune.atopia.net>
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> shell# cat /dev/urandom > > can that executed as root cause any harm to the system? What > if a random > sequence of `rm *` was generated... would it be executed? > the question is: WHAT FOR should someone logged in as root execute "cat /dev/urandom" without redirecting the output? anyway, from my experience of "trying" this a few times (it does not matter if on a local console or using a ssh-client) sometimes there's code left in the commandline afterwards and if you hit enter, it's executed... directly executed strings i've also seen. for now, i didn't have the occurrence of any system-command being generated, but that's random... the unlucky one would get it asap ;-) if you like to get RANDOM content anywhere use dd instead of cat. example to erase a whole disk i'd type: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/<devicefile> bs=1024k be sure that the devicefile exists, or you'll fill up your /root fs. br...
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