Hey all. I'm writing a passwerd session handler (over CGI of course) and I want to generate big randoms as the key for each open transaction to maintain server-side session status info without embedding static security info within printed HTML. It's not a big deal but the first thing I tried was: 
my $rndm = sprintf "%lx", int rand(16**8); 
#why only 4hex digits when num is 8?

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I've printed 16**8 and gotten ~4billion which is 2**32. Are numerics maxed at 4bil unless you use Integer Modules for long text math? I'm using this now which werks fine but It's not as straight forward as the first.
my $rndm = int rand(16**4);
my $sess = sprintf "%lx", $rndm;
$rndm = int rand(16**4);
$sess .= sprintf "%lx", $rndm;

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Thanks for any insight. TTFN & Shalom.

-PipTigger
p.s. Is there a reason why not to have a "dec" function to be the reciprocal of "hex"? Why does ProgrammingPerl use sprintf to convert hex->dec instead of a function which seems cleaner?

In reply to Why doesn't this give an 8 character hex number? by PipTigger

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