On Mon, Dec 31, 2018 at 8:12 PM Chet Ramey <chet.ra...@case.edu> wrote: : > Thanks for the patch. I'll take a look after I release bash-5.0. One > question: can you reproduce the same random sequence by using the same > seed? That's for backwards compatibility, even if the sequences themselves > differ.
Yes. Seeding with a value will give the same sequence: $ RANDOM=4; echo $RANDOM $RANDOM 21584 22135 $ RANDOM=4; echo $RANDOM $RANDOM 21584 22135 For backwards compatibility integers are supported, but they are really parsed as strings. Strings make it easier to seed with more than 64-bits: RANDOM=`cat GPLv3.txt` So these give the same value on 4.4.23, but differs with the patch applied: RANDOM=$(echo 2^64 | bc );echo $RANDOM RANDOM=$(echo 2^65 | bc );echo $RANDOM RANDOM="foo"; echo $RANDOM RANDOM="bar"; echo $RANDOM RANDOM=2; echo $RANDOM RANDOM=" 2.0"; echo $RANDOM RANDOM=" 2.0noise"; echo $RANDOM /Ole
