username is already taken! a service

January 2, 2023

beep

Stumbled across this site in almost a creepy way. I was going through my old work computer and had a trillion shell scripts that did god(dess) knows what. One of them was titled simply short_names with no file ext and bc it was red had been chmod +x'd' at some point lol.

# All possible combinations of 4 letters,
# each on one line for streaming and in random order
combinations="$(echo {a..z}{a..z}{a..z} | tr " " "\n" | shuf)"

echo "possibilities: $(echo "$combinations" | wc -l)"

# Filter to only names that 404 on github.com,
# 10 in parallel (might still take a while),
# and write them to a file
echo "$combinations" | xargs -P10 -I{} sh -c "curl -sfI https://github.com/{} > /dev/null || echo {}" > github.txt
echo "available on Github: $(wc -l github.txt)"

# Do the same thing for twitter.com
cat github.txt | xargs -P10 -I{} sh -c "curl -sfI https://twitter.com/{} > /dev/null || echo {}" > github-twitter.txt

It takes about 15 minutes to execute and then writes a file github.txt which as of yesterday was 10,500 lines of available names on both github & twitter. This site does the same thing but for like 100+ platforms. It spits out a txt file like this, with some of these working and some not—s/o to creatrice find short usernames.

17433  psz
17434  zbg
17435  ttc
17436  mid
17437  mnl
17438  uxn
17439  okq
17440  msp
17441  vmt
17442  hnu
17443  bvt
17444  inh
17445  bwo
17446  jmy
17447  gzw
17448  lkg
17449  kdo
17450  opy