Revision 1.5, Sun Jan 10 01:15:52 2016 UTC (8 years, 4 months ago) by tb
Branch: MAIN
CVS Tags: OPENBSD_7_5_BASE, OPENBSD_7_5, OPENBSD_7_4_BASE, OPENBSD_7_4, OPENBSD_7_3_BASE, OPENBSD_7_3, OPENBSD_7_2_BASE, OPENBSD_7_2, OPENBSD_7_1_BASE, OPENBSD_7_1, OPENBSD_7_0_BASE, OPENBSD_7_0, OPENBSD_6_9_BASE, OPENBSD_6_9, OPENBSD_6_8_BASE, OPENBSD_6_8, OPENBSD_6_7_BASE, OPENBSD_6_7, OPENBSD_6_6_BASE, OPENBSD_6_6, OPENBSD_6_5_BASE, OPENBSD_6_5, OPENBSD_6_4_BASE, OPENBSD_6_4, OPENBSD_6_3_BASE, OPENBSD_6_3, OPENBSD_6_2_BASE, OPENBSD_6_2, OPENBSD_6_1_BASE, OPENBSD_6_1, OPENBSD_6_0_BASE, OPENBSD_6_0, OPENBSD_5_9_BASE, OPENBSD_5_9, HEAD
Changes since 1.4: +3 -1 lines

Random sequences generated by jot -r have been suffering from a dramatic
bias at both ends of the given interval.  Various clever workarounds are
documented in the manual.

This fixes the bias in some of the most common use cases, namely random
sequences of integers or real numbers rounded to a fixed number of
decimals.  So, `jot -p 3 -r 10000 0 1' produces a uniformly distributed
sequence of 10,000 decimal numbers of the form 0.abc (or 1).

Internally, jot -r now uses arc4random_uniform() whenever this is
clearly possible.  In particular `jot -r 1 10 20' yields an unbiased
random number between 10 and 20 (both ends inclusive) from the shell.

guidance and ok deraadt@, "i like it" benno@