I am trying to write a script, the problem is, I need to 'cat /dev/urandom' into a file for a certain amount of time. Since /dev/urandom will never end, the command will never complete and my script will more-or-less halt.

I've been experimenting with background processes. My idea was to send 'cat /dev/urandom > ./blah' to the background, and in the foreground have the shell wait for a certain amount of time then kill the background process.

cat /dev/urandom > ./blah &
sleep 1
kill [backgroud process pid]

I, however, don't know how to tell the script the PID of the background process. I know typing 'jobs' in the shell will output the commands in the background, and I could possibly cut the output of that down with something like awk or sed to just what I need, but that seems overly complicated.

Can anyone enlighten me as to a simple way to do this?

man dd will tell you more on the option there, but thats something to get ye started (:

Thanks! I also noticed the command 'head' would print the first lines of a file, which could give me a similar effect. Instead of just saying print gibberish for 10 seconds, I say print 1,000 lines of gibberish. Quite handy.

The 'head' command depends on '\n' to determine the end of the line. The output of /dev/urandom isn't lines of text, so the 'head' command in't suitable.

kill -SIGHUP %1
The "%" is shorthand for the job-number.
If you might have other jobs running in the background, you could use ${!}.
${!} refers to the last job.

The bash info manual gives other ways you can refer to a background processes.