genrandom
What Is genrandom?
genrandom is a program to generate lists of random numbers for human consumption, such as for selecting random entries from a list (simple random samples). It was developed to generate SRSs for statistical work. It has the ability to ensure all values are unique, and may also be easily used by shell scripts.
Development Status
genrandom 0.95 is currently a very stable beta. While development is continuing, the main fuctionality is fully implemented.
Version 0.95 introduces a much better scaling algorithm to replace the simpler, but usually biased, modulus function.
genrandom has been developed under Linux (SuSE 9.1/i586 and Gentoo/amd64), but it should work on most any Unix flavor. It is likely portable to OS X, and possibly, with some hacking, to Windows.
The presence of a /dev/random and/or /dev/urandom is required for -R and -U to function. -A requires a special, homebrew Americium based hardware RNG, which will be release later (with hardware design).
Downloads
The current version of genrandom is 0.95. The gzipped source tarball may be downloaded here.
Previous releases can be found here.
Note that this is still beta-level software. Please let me know how it works for you (or if it doesn't).
Contact/Bug Reports
If/when you find bugs, please report them to me, Anya Turnquist at anya@turnquist.name. Bug fixes and patches are also welcome, as are reports of systems the program works on.
To Do
- Add -D device option for reading entropy from any device
- Clean up crufty option parsing