srand in awk is platform specific. on most recent is isn't a straight call to sr... | Hacker News

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nikcub on Aug 11, 2011 | parent | context | favorite | on: Xkcd Password Generator

srand in awk is platform specific. on most recent is isn't a straight call to srand().

I have another version that I use that stuffs srand but in the end I figured srand from a 250k dictionary is still better than picking words out of your head from a ~1k dictionary

gjm11 on Aug 11, 2011 [–]

I looked at the trunk code for gawk on Savannah when I wrote the above. It passes the output of time(0) straight into srand().

The size of the dictionary doesn't matter (given that it's more than about 70 words); the limiting factor is the entropy in the RNG seeding.

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