Don't forget that when you use 'rand' you have to 'srand' to initialize the random number generator:

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Please don't. As others have noted, Perl often does this for you. What they haven't noted is that when Perl does, it does a better job than you did.

For more details and suggestions of how to do it in a way that works for both old and new Perl, see Perl's auto srand() RE: a random sort of list.

During testing, I found it odd that rand() was producing random numbers without the use of srand(), which for the longest time was a strict requirement. Now, I would have deleted the node, but by the time I got around to doing that, the thread was growing like a weed.

Just another one of those incredible things that changed but nobody really knew.

A correction: perldoc -f srand says:

In fact, it's usually not necessary to call
`srand' at all, because if it is not called
explicitly, it is called implicitly at the first
use of the `rand' operator.

But I note:

 However, this was not
               the case in version of Perl before 5.004

So there ya go.