On Sun, 2003-08-10 at 10:52, Kent Borg wrote: > 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.
Thanks. od looks cool. I've never seen that before. I'll have to take a look Bret -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
