Generating file with ASCII numbers using /dev/urandom

You're observing a combination of the peculiar behavior of dd with the peculiar behavior of Linux's /dev/random. Both, by the way, are rarely the right tool for the job.

Linux's /dev/random returns data sparingly. It is based on the assumption that the entropy in the pseudorandom number generator is extinguished at a very fast rate. Since gathering new entropy is slow, /dev/random typically relinquishes only a few bytes at a time.

dd is an old, cranky program initially intended to operate on tape devices. When you tell it to read one block of 1kB, it attempts to read one block. If the read returns less than 1024 bytes, tough, that's all you get. So dd if=/dev/random bs=1K count=2 makes two read(2) calls. Since it's reading from /dev/random, the two read calls typically return only a few bytes, in varying number depending on the available entropy. See also When is dd suitable for copying data? (or, when are read() and write() partial)

Unless you're designing an OS installer or cloner, you should never use /dev/random under Linux, always /dev/urandom. The urandom man page is somewhat misleading; /dev/urandom is in fact suitable for cryptography, even to generate long-lived keys. The only restriction with /dev/urandom is that it must be supplied with sufficient entropy; Linux distributions normally save the entropy between reboots, so the only time you might not have enough entropy is on a fresh installation. Entropy does not wear off in practical terms. For more information, read Is a rand from /dev/urandom secure for a login key? and Feeding /dev/random entropy pool?.

Most uses of dd are better expressed with tools such as head or tail. If you want 2kB of random bytes, run

head -c 2k </dev/urandom >rand

With older Linux kernels, you could get away with

dd if=/dev/urandom of=rand bs=1k count=2

because /dev/urandom happily returned as many bytes as requested. But this is no longer true since kernel 3.16, it's now limited to 32MB.

In general, when you need to use dd to extract a fixed number of bytes and its input is not coming from a regular file or block device, you need to read byte by byte: dd bs=1 count=2048.

You can use od to get numbers out of /dev/random and /dev/urandom.

For example,

2 byte unsigned decimal integers,

$ od -vAn -N2 -tu2 < /dev/urandom
24352

1 byte signed decimal integer,

$ od -vAn -N1 -td1 < /dev/urandom
-78

4 byte unsigned decimal integers,

$ od -vAn -N4 -tu4 < /dev/urandom
3394619386

man od for more information on od.