On Sat, Aug 09, 2003 at 05:07:08PM -0500, Bret Hughes wrote: > I was able to dd the /dev/urandom but was lost how to turn all those > funky chars into a number.
You are on a binary computer, and /dev/urandom is spitting out binary data--what could be more fundamentally a number than that? If you want some ACSII representation of your bits you need to decide what kind of number you want: "Pick a number from one to ten.", double precision between 0 and 1, integer from 0 to 255--the possibilities are many. I am not a shell scripting guru, but I can suggest the starting point of using "od" (octal dump): $ head -c 2 /dev/random | od -v -i 0000000 23557 0000002 $ head -c 4 /dev/random | od -v -l 0000000 1766076095 0000004 $ head -c 4 /dev/random | od -f -v 0000000 5.071397e+23 0000004 In that output the first column is the "address" (od is intended to be for examining files), so you need to find some od option to omit that or filter it out later. The first example is two bytes turned into a signed 16-bit integer, the second is four bytes turned into a signed 32-bit integer, the third is four bytes turned into a single precision floating point. I am sure there is a better way to do this (a better tool than od?), but that should get you started. -kb -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
