For some reason I never was that excited about trying to accomplish these sorts of things in Perl:

1..rand(256)).inject("") {|string,n| string + ('a'..'z').to_a[rand(25)] }

This generates a string from 1 to 256 characters long, containing random letters from 'a' to 'z'.  

Normally, I wouldn't use something that's quite so unreadable, but I'm starting to like Ruby's way of taking what should be a very simple operation that I might have done in 3-5 lines in Perl and boiling it down to a single line.

I'd love to see if anyone can make this more succinct (but one line is still a requirement!)

Here's the code in it's context. It's just a test script writing into my partition table every minute so I can verify my Events from previous posts are working correctly.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'mysql'


dbh = Mysql.new( "server.domain.com",
    "user", "pass", "test", 3306)

loop do
    string = ""; rand(256).times { string << ('a'..'z').to_a[rand(25)] }
    dbh.query( "INSERT INTO log (logged, text) VALUES (
'#{Time.now.strftime( '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')}', 
'#{(1..rand(256)).inject("") {|string,n| string + ('a'..'z').to_a[rand(25)] }}'
)" );
    sleep 60
end