Generating a random fake name from the commandline
Today I needed to come up with a list of lots of fake names for test data. In the past, I either manually entered well-known fictional character names (e.g. Homer J. Simpson), or used strings of characters (like ‘asdf g. hjkl’ or ‘aaaaaaaaaaaaaa’).
I remembered seeing some sort of test data generator, somewhere, recently, so I googled for “fake name generator test data“.
What I found was http://www.fakenamegenerator.com, which generates realistic test data based on country, name origin, and gender specifications. More info on the site at the end of this post. Here’s a set of commands that I put together to retrieve one fake name from that site:
curl -s -b agreement=Yes “http://www.fakenamegenerator.com”
| grep -o ‘on Google”>\([^<]\+\)’
| sed -e “s/[^>]*>\([^<<]\+\)<.*/\1/g”
When you use the site like a normal human being, the fake data that is generated includes full name, address, email address (usable, provided by an anonymous email service), phone number, mother’s maiden name, date of birth, and credit card number (+ expiration date). Very cool! For a very small fee, you can also order a bulk batch of data, which also includes fake Social Security Numbers).
However, being the penny-pinching and geeky type, I wanted to be able to generate my own list of fake names (without all the other info), for free. The set of commands listed above work right now, from a cygwin bash shell, but will probably break sometime in the future, when the HTML structure of the page changes. Oh well.
Oh yeah, don’t forget to read their terms of service* before using the service… Right now, I could not find anything prohibiting the use of automated tools to generate and retrieve names, but use the above set of commands at your own risk!
* The terms of service page only displays one time, unless you clear/disable your cookies.
subscribe to entries feed
July 13th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
Cool trick! And I’m digging your l33t commandline skills!