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Old 08-21-2016, 09:47 AM   #1
fiascoburnett
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Does 'shuf' need to be reseeded?


And if so, how?
The object is to run a script that will not use the same values if it needs to be restarted because of e.g. power failures.
 
Old 08-21-2016, 02:50 PM   #2
norobro
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The answer to both questions is in the documentation:
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreuti...Random-sources
 
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Old 08-22-2016, 12:41 AM   #3
sundialsvcs
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... and, actually, even these much-decried "not so random" sources are actually ... as my uncle would say, "good enough for Peace work." They're not going to be flummoxed by power-failures, because they will use, for example, things like "the current time," as a partial source of their default entropy.

"Good enough for Peace work," then, but "not good enough for Cryptography." And, maybe also, not good enough for clusters of computers (especially, virtual machines).

Randomness sources such as urandom are arguably better, but the default sources certainly are not ignorant, nor useless.

So: do you probably want to "re-seed" this PRNG = Pseudo-Random Number Generator? Almost certainly not (IMHO). "Re-seeding" is basically there to be used when you wish to repeat a "random" sequence (for some statistical reason ...). Otherwise, you probably don't want to do it, and (IMHO) should not do it.

Last edited by sundialsvcs; 08-22-2016 at 12:44 AM.
 
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