In the below command which prints a 32 character length key why < command is placed at the beginning?
< /dev/urandom tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 | head -c32
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Hello,
The tr command can read directly from stdin. So the two following expressions are more or less going to work in the same way:
< /dev/urandom tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 | head -c32
or
tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 < /dev/urandom | head -c32
Basically, the redirections can appear anywhere on a simple command.
An alternative approach is to use the cat command which is going to just add an extra step but produce the same result:
cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 | head -c32
Hope that this helps!
Best,
Bobby
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