As part of my work, I need to ensure I can upload and download a reasonably large document. Just to ensure that I can validate that downloaded document is the same document after uploading. I decided to find a way to create a large text file with random string.

After quick search, the easiest and reliable way for me is to use Linux. On Windows, I simply use WSL and change directory to /mnt/c/... which is the same directory as C:\... in Windows, e.g. /mnt/c/Users/username/Downloads. That way I know where the file is saved to and can access it on Windows side.

And to generate the text file, I modified the command that I found online since I want to specify the size of the file and ends up with:

tr -dc "A-Za-z0-9" < /dev/urandom will generate random alphanumeric string.

fold -w100 will insert a new line every 100 characters. This helps to be able to open the file fast which works very well in Notepad++ compared to putting all the characters in a single line.

• head -c 100M > textfile.txt will take the first 100MB of randomly generated characters and save them in textfile.txt.

There you go. I managed to create text files with various sizes for my testing. Obviously, the larger the file, the longer it takes.

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