New Garbage Program

What? Have I written a really bad program? Well that's not for me to say. What I intended to write was a little new Windows command line program that creates a file of a specified size that's full of garbage. It's called gbg. 

This just scratches an itch I had while testing the BDiff/BPatch programs from my website. I wanted to stress test them diffing and patching two large, almost completely different files. I just needed something to create some test files of exactly the right size.

Now there's probably already a program out there that does just that, but that's no fun. So I scribbled one down in my shiny new copy of Delphi 11.3, just for fun.

I've just put out gbg v0.1.0. It's very much the first attempt, so don't expect too much! It's extremely simple to use. You just pass it a file path followed by a file size in bytes. Press enter, and it's done. Well almost: if the file size is quite large, you'll be asked to confirm first.

The largest permitted file size is 21,474,836,480 bytes (i.e. 20GiB). You can enter the thousands delimiter if you wish, but v0.1.0 is not yet clever enough to decipher any memory units like MB or MiB.

You can get gbg via its web page, or more directly, from its GitHub Release page.

Source code is MIT licensed and is on GitHub in the delphidabbler/gbg repository.



Comments

  1. Anonymous7:41 am

    Version 0.2: Add /a switch to generate ASCII text file

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Delphidabbler3:54 pm

      Good idea. Do you think it matters how long lines should be. Also random text ASCII 32 to 126 or some "real" text like lorem ipsum?

      Delete

Post a Comment

Comments are very welcome, but please don't comment here if:

1) You have a query about, or a bug report for, one of my programs or libraries. Most of my posts contain a link to the relevant repository where there will be an issue tracker you can use.

2) You have a query about any 3rd party programs I feature, please address them to the developer(s) - there will be a link in the post.

3) You're one of the tiny, tiny minority who are aggressive or abusive - in the bin you go and reported you will be!

Thanks

Popular posts from this blog

Initialising dynamic arrays

When writing some unit tests a while ago I found myself needing to initialise some dynamic arrays with test data. It would be nice if we could do something like this: var A : array of Integer ; begin A := ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ) ; // !! WRONG end ; but we can't. So I decided to write some functions to initialise dynamic arrays to the contents of another array, be it a constant, a literal or another dynamic array. The result was a set of overloaded routines, one for each data type I needed to handle, for example for Integer and string arrays I had: function CloneArray ( const A : array of Integer ) : TIntegerDynArray ; overload ; var Idx : Integer ; begin SetLength ( Result , Length ( A ) ) ; for Idx := Low ( A ) to High ( A ) do Result [ Idx - Low ( A ) ] := A [ Idx ] ; end ; function CloneArray ( const A : array of string ) : TStringDynArray ; overload ; var Idx : Integer ; begin SetLength ( Result , Len...
Read more

Deleting elements from a dynamic array

In my blog " Initialising Dynamic Arrays " I mentioned I have been writing some unit tests that needed numerous repetative array initialisation operations. Well, one of the other common operations I found myself writing was the deletion of items from dynamic arrays. So I decided to find a generic way of doing this. Assuming we know the index of the item to be deleted we need the equivalent of Delphi's built-in Delete procedure for strings. If you read the previous post you won't be surprised to learn that I decided to further extend the Generics.Collections.TArray class by adding to the TArrayEx class I introduced there. My first attempt emulates Delphi's Delete procedure by deleting the array element in-place: i.e. it updates the array passed as a parameter. Unsurprisingly the method is called DeleteInPlace . Here's how it goes: type TArrayEx = class ( TArray ) public .. . class procedure DeleteInPlace < T > ( var A : ...
Read more

New String Property Editor Planned For RAD Studio 12 Yukon 🤞

Image
This blog post is based on a pre-release version of the RAD Studio software and it has been written with specific permission by Embarcadero. No feature is committed until the product GA release. It seems I'm getting very excited about multi-line strings of late. My previous post was about multi-line string literals for Delphi  and this time I'm talking about the new multi-line string property editor being slated for the RAD Studio 12 IDE. For more years than I care to remember, I've been frustrated by the inability to enter multi-line strings in the Delphi IDE object inspector. That meant having to resort to code to initialise some multi-line labels. So frustrated was I that I wrote a little property editor of my own ( stringpe ), way back in 2004. It's still around and on GitHub. Here's what it (sometimes) looks like: Yeah, I know this is Vista - I used an old screenshot Sometimes? Well it looked like that until it got installed on DPI aware Delphis, and then it sh...
Read more