You don't have to read the whole file just to modify three bytes:

Actually, I knew: I didn't use "your" technique, because I'm less familiar with it and the whole point of the program was to create a test case that were "small enough." (I just wanted to... get it done, if you know what I mean!) Indeed, not only is your approach more efficient, but it is even simpler as a whole: well done mentioning it!

seek $fh, $offset, SEEK_SET or die "$fn: D'Oh! $!\n";
read $fh, my $cont, $LEN;
seek $fh, $offset, SEEK_SET or die "$fn: D'Oh! $!\n";
print $fh $cont ^ join '', map chr( rand 0x100 ), 1 .. $LEN;

[download]

(Incidentally, there's a typo that makes for a syntax error: missing parens around my $cont.)

It can be even easier than that: given that we're xoring with completely random bytes (as opposed, say, to bytes with a prescribed number of bits on) we may avoid doing so altogether and just print them, thus:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Fcntl ':seek';

die "Usage: $0 file\n" unless @ARGV == 1;
my $fn  = shift;
my $LEN = 3;

open my $fh, '+<:raw', $fn or die "$fn: D'Oh! $!\n";
seek $fh, rand(-$LEN + -s $fh), SEEK_SET or die "$fn: D'Oh! $!\n";
print $fh map chr rand 0x100, 1 .. $LEN;

__END__

[download]

Oh my!

--
If you can't understand the incipit, then please check the IPB Campaign.

In reply to Re^2: Randomly mangle a binary file by blazar
in thread Randomly mangle a binary file by blazar

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