Nowadays lots of website (especially the free WiFi hotspots around cities and at the airports) require you to sign up using name and legit address, which is not something many would be willing to do. Yet access to the website or service is necessary which means the annoying task of creating a random identity with correct address, which can be quite painful.

Thankfully, majority of the Unix systems have a great CLI program called rig that generates a simple and random name with geographically correct address.

You need to install this program using either sudo apt-get install rig or brew install rig for Debian or MacOS, respectively.

Usage of rig is extremely easy. In the terminal, type rig and in return you will have a random name and address:

$ rig

Delbert Raymond
593 Lake Dr
Albany, NY  12212
(518) xxx-xxxx

To generate bulk of random identities, you can pass the flag -c with the program:

$ rig -c 3

Kristina Macias
260 Genesse Blvd
Hamilton, OH  45012
(513) xxx-xxxx

Kelli Aguilar
181 Limetree Ln
Anderson, IN  46018
(317) xxx-xxxx

Ty Rogers
864 Old Pinbrick Dr
Gary, IN  46401
(219) xxx-xxxx

Furthermore, passing the flag -m or -f option returns male or female names only, respectively. By default, both male and female names are returned.

The address are retrieved from simple text file named with the extension .idx stored in /usr/share/rig for Linux and at the location where the brew installed the package on MacOS.

You can quickly check where brew package is installed using brew info rig.

Issues

  1. Addresses: Addresses from the rig are geographically correct but limited to US. For address in other countries, such as Luxembourg, are not provided built-in. An easy workaround is to create custom .idx files for different countries.
  2. Phone Numbers: The output of rig does not contain full phone numbers. They are listed with the area code and x’s, which is typical US phone format. These phone numbers are useless as one needs to use mobile numbers in certain registrations.
  3. English Names Only: Names are limited to the most common English names. This would not be an issue unless you are looking for specific sounding names :P