Stacking Code

I needed a quick random string for an Amazon S3 bucket name. Amazon S3 buckets share a global namespace, no two buckets can have the same name. The name I want is usually taken, so I deal with the restriction by adding a dash and six random characters to the end. Some people use GUIDs, but 36⁶ produces over two billion combinations. Combined with the desired bucket name, uniqueness is pretty much guaranteed. (It looks a lot nicer too.)

Of course I could randomly bash the keyboard until I get a unqiue name, or I could get PowerShell to generate a random string for me. I opted for PowerShell. ;)

EDIT: Replaced System.Random with Get-Random.

$set = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789".ToCharArray()
$result += $set | Get-Random

I repeated the last command until I got the length I wanted and then I printed the result.

And here's a reusable script version.

param (
    [int]$Length
)
$set    = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789".ToCharArray()
$result = ""
for ($x = 0; $x -lt $Length; $x++) {
    $result += $set | Get-Random
}
return $result