Automatically creating randomized small files for testing on Windows

Question

On Linux I can create a large number of small files from the command line for various testing purposes:

for x in {1..100}
head -n 512 /dev/urandom > file_$x

What's the best way to achieve something similar on Windows?

Answer 1

Ideas:

1. Create the files on a Linux box and copy/move them to the Windows box.
2. Use /dev/urandom from Cygwin
3. Python's os.urandom() calls Windows' internal cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator

Answer 2

You could possibly copy some of the random files in your TEMP directory if you really don't care about the content of the files that you use for testing. From the command prompt:

CD %TEMP%

...takes you to the temp directory which usually contains plenty of files, although you might need to ignore the ones which are 0kb if these are useless to you.

Copy files from this directory to the directory from which you need to test whatever it is that you are testing?