dd in Python

09 December 2010

Commonly I create temporary files using dd like this:

dd if=/dev/random of=blah bs=1m count=16

That will generate a random 16MB file named blah.

Doing the same thing in python looks something like this:

with open("blah", 'w') as f:
    for i in range((16*2**20)/512):
        f.write(os.urandom(512))

Posting here because it took me about 15 minutes longer than it should have to find that function.