What is Randfile?#

Randfile is a Go commandline application that ingests a directory path and picks a random file. This is a small project. But, it has its place in my setup.

For my purposes this is for learning and randomly picking a wallpaper PNG or JPEG and outputting its full path for Sway or i3wm.

Build from Source#

Clone the randfile repository.

git clone https://github.com/n3s0/randfile.git

Build the application.

go build

Move the application to wherever you wish. I’ll work on making installation a little easier at some point. Just need to learn how.

I generally put it in the /usr/local/bin using the following command.

sudo cp ./randfile /usr/local/bin/randfile

Future Deployment Options#

In the future I intend on either putting this into package repos for different operating systems. This includes Debian/Ubuntu, CentOS/Fedora, Arch Linux, etc. Although I don’t think this would be entirely useful to everyone. Nor is it popular enough to just deploy. I would like to learn how to package and deploy open-source software. So, I thought this would be a good start to learning how to do that. Considering how these different distros have their own flavor of packaging and deploying software.

The following list contains a list of distrobutions I would like to attempt to package this application for. This will also be done in various ARM and x86_64 architectures.

  • Arch Linux
  • Debian
  • Ubuntu
  • Fedora

I learn by doing.

Usage#

Running the application is pretty straight forward. Run randfile with either the -p or –path flags and it will provide a random file from that path.

randfile -p /path/to/directory

OR (if it’s not in the file path)

./randfile -p /path/to/directory

Provided is the output of the command.

/path/to/directory/file.png

If anyone would like to follow the progress of this project. For updates and submitting issues. Here are some links.