in reply to Re: Randomly mangle a binary file
in thread Randomly mangle a binary file

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;

(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__

Oh my!

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