i have an arbitrary number called 'result'

i need for result to be equal to a random that can range anywhere from 1 to 100...

does anyone have any idea how to do this?

i have searched the internet for an answer and have not found one yet... any help would be appreciated....

erm, something wrong with the random()/rand() functions?? check the manpage

err ... next

i tried this:

result = random(100);

like it said but i kept getting errors

int rand(void)
returns a pseudo-random integer in the range 0 to RAND_MAX which is at least 32767

void srand(unsigned int seed)
srand uses seed as the seed for a new sequence of pseudo random numbers. The initial seed is 1.

The above is from page 252 of
The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie. A very highly recommended book.

Here you go boss:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>

int RandNumGen(){
int x = rand() % 101;
return x;
}

int main(){
int x;
srand(time(NULL));
x = RandNumGen();
printf ("\n\n%i\n\n", x);
return 0;
}

If you use: int x = rand() % 101;
you get 0 <= x <= 100

Try: int x = (rand() % 100) + 1;
you get 1 <= x <= 100

to get a random number between 1 to 100 just use:

result = 1 + rand() % 100;


rand() --> Gives you a number between 0 and RAND_MAX
rand() % N --> Gives you a number between 0 and (N - 1)
M + rand() % N --> This shifts the above statement M numbers, so you get a number between M and (N - 1) + M


Hope this clearifies things a little.

rand() tends to give you crappy random numbers. a better way is to read from /dev/urandom just open the file and read a character at a time then typecast it as a int and mod it by 100.

?? fine... whatever.

These are some of the best suggestions i've seen so far for creating a RNG but...

If you compile this:

and then run it, u get the same number if it's run twice (or more) in the same second (roughly)... K thats probably me being fussy but if ya need something to continuously chuck you random numbers for 5 seconds you're screwed

There must be a better way than using time(), hmmm i'm gonna sleep on it lol

So use something that get you millisecond values. Such as the ftime function found in sys/timeb.h. It gives you a timeb structure, which gives you a time_t time, and a millitm, which is the number of seconds since the time_t, so you need to add them something like so:

Note: I'm sure there are probably better functions for getting millisecond values in Linux, but I'm still not all that familiar with all the standard libraries generally available with Linux. In Windows, I would use the API function timeGetTime(). Anyone know of a similar method for Linux?

Yeah that works really well - but when ya run it you get long negative numbers, what about short positive numbers?

Hmmmm there must be a way

you can also read in from /dev/urandom (or /dev/random but that requires user input)

rand() is a crappy PRNG?

It depends on what you're doing with it. For encryption it's out of the question. For number guessing games like 'pick a number from 1 to 20'
it's fine. As several posters pointed out, if you call srand() with a seed value that changes (like some kind of fine-grained time value) you avoid the problem of the sequence of numbers being the same.

Linux provides lrand48 (man drand48) that is as easy to use as rand() and is considered a much better PRNG - depending on what you are doing.

For most of what beginning programmers do rand() is just fine.