This is an evolution of the random filename generator I posted last week. Based on comments from BrianEnigma, this script allows you to specify “starts with” arguments to get an adjective and a noun using the WordNet dictionaries.

You can use the ready-made set I have here, or download the “Database files only” from WordNet and run this on the index.adj and index.noun files to create your libraries:

awk '{print $1}' index.adj > adjectives.txt

Edit the script below to point to the location of your dictionary files. Then just install and source it to start using. If you provide a single alphabet character as an argument, both the adjective and the noun will start with that letter. Provide two, separated by a space, and the adjective will start with the first one, the noun with the second. You can still provide no arguments to get random words from the full alphabet.

Examples:

$ gen_random_filename
measly_hypostatization

$ gen_random_filename a b
arrhythmic_bering_time

$ gen_random_filename z
zambian_zoysia_matrella

And the script:

gen_random_filename.bashraw
" 
# Bash function gen_random_filename
# Description: Generates random file names
# Requires shuf (brew install coreutils)
# Requires a list of adjectives and nouns (1 per line)

gen_random_filename() {
	local adjs=~/words/adjectives.txt
	local nouns=~/words/nouns.txt
	local adj noun title starts_with_1 starts_with_2 counter

	# process arguments for "starts_with" variables
	counter=1
	while [[ -n $1 ]]; do
		# only accept single letter (a-z) arguments
		if [[ $1 =~ ^[a-zA-Z]$ ]]; then
			eval starts_with_$counter="$1"
			counter=$[counter + 1]
		fi
		shift
	done

	# if starts_with_1 has a value and starts_with_2 doesn't, duplicate
	[[ -z $starts_with_2 && -n $starts_with_1 ]] && starts_with_2=$starts_with_1

	# if shuf is installed...
	if [[ $(which shuf) ]]; then
		# grep for starts_with value and pick random result
		# if starts_with is empty, grep will return all entries
		adj=`grep --color=never -e "^$starts_with_1" $adjs | shuf -n 1`
		noun=`grep --color=never -e "^$starts_with_2" $nouns | shuf -n 1`
		# concatenate adjective and noun
		title=`echo ${adj}_${noun}`
	# otherwise, error
	else
		cat <<-EOS
		$FUNCNAME requires the utility shuf to generate random names.
		Use homebrew to install "coreutils," which includes shuf.
		EOS
		return
	fi
	echo $title
}

I’m using this with a script that generates large blocks of random lorem ipsum (based on the Lorem Ingsoc scripts) in a series of files with a Marked index file for testing Marked 2. Here’s the basic idea, just for reference. It’s truncated, but shows how to use the function above in a script:

if [[ -z $title ]]; then
	echo "Generating random title"
	title=$(gen_random_filename $start_with_1 $start_with_2)
fi

mkdir include 2> /dev/null

includefile="include/$title"
echo -e "# Test Index\n\n" > $title-index.marked
jot -w "${includefile}-%d.md" - 1 $count|xargs -I % touch "%"
jot -w "${includefile}-%d.md" - 1 $count|xargs -I % echo -e "<<[%]\n" >> ${title}-index.marked