tr on OS X

[Scott Haneda]

On Apr 2, 2010, at 10:08 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote:

> On Apr 3, 2010, at 00:31 , Scott Haneda wrote:
>> If anyone can point me to a relevant thread, I would appreciate it.  I am working on a port and I keep getting a "tr: Illegal byte sequence", which is no fault of MacPorts, but the answer to this may lead me down the path of an explanation.
> 
> This is an I18N error.  If you're operating on binary data for some reason, you may want to force LANG=C so you don't get errors about illegal characters in the locale (in this case, it would almost certainly be UTF8 unless for some reason you're working in a CJK character set).

The app appears to be reading in from /dev/urandom and piping it off to tr.  In my search for a solution, I have found two things about this.  Other nix's have no issue with this, and they also all seem to have a working /dev/urandom as well.  When I try, the app fails, changing urandom to random fixes it up to my `tr` troubles.

The `tr` issue, I was stumped, now it makes sense, as /dev/random would indeed to binary data.

Just out of curiosity, if I wanted to do something like:
$cat /dev/random | tr "a" "b"

How do I get `tr` to work?  I do not see anything in the man page that would allow me to treat the binary data as correctly.

This is for a quick random password generator app that I wanted to make a Portfile of.

Thank you very much, have a good weekend.
-- 
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