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

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