On 5/25/2023 10:24 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Samuel Sieb <samuel(a)sieb.net> said:
> On 5/25/23 18:18, Bill Cunningham wrote:
>> How would you access randomization at the system level? No
>> via srand or rand, but the randomization the system offers through
>> /dev/random. Would this be a fedora level system call ?
>>
>> I intend to take a 512 or 1024, for example, size chunk and
>> fill that with system randomization. Not what you get with srand
>> and rand I believe they are inferior to system randomization.
> Open /dev/random as a binary file and read however many bytes you want.
> I assume you know that the amount of data available from there is
> limited and if you ask for too much, you might have to wait a while
> for it to get generated.
There's also /dev/urandom (which should never "run out" of randomness),
but IIRC they're the basically same now and neither will block (except
possibly during boot).
But if you're writing a program, there's the getrandom() call.
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/getrandom.2.html
Oh ok I see I was thinking about open() and close() but I am not that
familiar with the system calls.
Thanks much