[PATCH] Add example to rand.3
Jonny Grant
jg@jguk.org
Tue Dec 27 21:37:44 GMT 2022
Hi Alex
On 26/12/2022 22:29, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> Hi Jonny,
>
> On 12/26/22 22:50, Jonny Grant wrote:
>> Hi Alejandro
>
> Please send also to my email.
>
>> Please find below a patch.
>>
>> 2022-12-26 Jonathan Grant <jg@jguk.org>
>> * man3/rand.3: Add example to rand.3 seed with time(NULL)
>>
>>
>> From 2d4501354ea6c465173fe6c089dfbcc80393a644 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
>> From: Jonathan Grant <jg@jguk.org>
>> Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2022 21:48:17 +0000
>> Subject: [PATCH] add rand.3 example
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Jonathan Grant <jg@jguk.org>
>
> time(NULL) is not too good. If you call it several times per second, you'll find that it only changes the seed every second. There are better ways to produce a good seed.
>
> However, I prefer suggesting arc4random() rather than workarounding rand(3) to get good results.
>
> Florian, did you already merge arc4random() to glibc?
Hopefully arc4random will come soon. Maybe rand.3 could then be updated to SEE ALSO that.
I would only mention to call srand once to seed, but you're right there are lots of other ways to get a seed.
Jonny
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