On Thu, 2003-03-20 at 11:56, Huard, Elise - D C&W Consultant wrote:....which isn't available on all flavours of Unix (e.g. Solaris up to v8). To solve this problem for cryptographic purposes, some brainy person wrote egd. This however requires 'input' to generate random numbers - and I don't no where to find it. A quick search on Freshmeat did turn up PRNGD (http://freshmeat.net/projects/prngd/?topic_id=44%2C136) which works in a similar manner to EGD and might suit your purposes.
wee question (to replace the pin-drop jokes :-) ) :
program in C under Unix.
Is there any way to get the time in tenth or hundredth of seconds ?
Or to phrase it differently : i need a random number generator that won't
give the same sequence of numbers every time that the seed is reinitialised
in the same second (by 2 different users)
srand(time(NULL)) and then rand()
doesn't work.
Or a different kind of seed ? Suggestions are welcome (should be readily
available in your standard Unix system)
Thanks,
Elise
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Read some entropy from /dev/urandom
Although I'm happy to be proved wrong, I don't know of a portable method of measuring sub-1second time on Unix. The usleep function seems to be fairly std as does clock, but not ideally suited to what you are doing.
...or the kludgy solution which is to create a hash of the time + PID + UID and seed the generator with that.
HTH
Colin
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