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I've got a file of data from a prototype hardware RNG, however, for some reason it's producing a lot of 0x00 bytes. I want to delete all of these 0x00 bytes so I can test if the rest of the data is random.

How would I go about doing this in the terminal?

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    What has caused you to decide that the 0x00 bytes are not random? How are you creating/writing that file? Commented Dec 5, 2020 at 23:39
  • @AndrewHenle to be honest, they looked like an artifact of something wrong with my transmission process. Removing the null bytes didn't help. I just figured it was worth trying. The data is being produced by a quantum-random number generator I've made and being transmitted to the comp over UART. I've checked the data on a scope and it looks as I'd expect so something's going wrong in my FPGA that's converting the randomness to a bit stream Commented Dec 6, 2020 at 0:54
  • I'm reading it in from a serial port using cat Commented Dec 6, 2020 at 1:10
  • PNG is a binary format so you may not want to remove 0 bytes, but I got a messed up text file which surely doesn't need any zeroes. Commented Jan 2, 2024 at 21:45
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    @CsabaToth rng is a random number generator, not a typo Commented Jan 3, 2024 at 17:41

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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tr -d '\0' <file >newfile

This deletes all nul bytes in the file file and saves the modified data in newfile.

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