On Sun, 6 Oct 2002, Fernando Gleiser wrote: > On Sun, 6 Oct 2002, Mikko Työläjärvi wrote: > > tr -cd a-zA-Z0-9 < /dev/urandom | dd bs=$len count=1 2>/dev/null
It didn't work. My shell is tcsh so I tried: tr -cd a-zA-Z0-9 < /dev/urandom | dd bs=8 count=1 >& /dev/null And all I got was the next prompt. > > Which will give you $len random bytes from the set a-zA-Z0-9 (it reads > > a lot more from /dev/urandom than it produces though). > yes, and that is bad :( > It is not good to mess with /dev/[u]random more than what's really needed, > because you can exhaust the entropy pool, and that's a Bad Thing. How large (deep?) is this entropy pool? > In your home box, for learning purposes, that's OK, but in a production box > which needs a good working prng (for crypto session keys, auth cookies and the > like) it is not acceptable to "eat" all the entropy pool unless you have > a very good reason to do so. > Fer They ought to build motherboards with tiny lava lamps for randomness :) > > Another answer is, as always, "use perl" :-) > > $.02, > > /Mikko Yeah yeah-yeah. It's just nice having an all-inclusive OS, that's all! -- Peter Leftwich President & Founder Video2Video Services Box 13692, La Jolla, CA, 92039 USA +1-413-403-9555 To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
