Perl should really be able to return the value of the seed it uses.

No. It's a feature that it doesn't return its seed somehow. The random number generator is there to generate random data, to the extend that this is practical on a deterministic machine.

So it's a feature that the sequence which rand() returns isn't easily reproducible - unless you've taken care to make it so, by first calling srand.

In reply to Re^3: Getting srand's seed by moritz
in thread Getting srand's seed by fangly

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