Re^2: A reproducible shuffle? ("stable shuffle")

Reseeding doesn't need to be cryptographically perfect. srand(Time::HiRes::time() ^ $$ ^ $other_randomness) should be good enough. Also, I have access to /dev/random and /dev/urandom, though I am uncertain how random they are (shared webhost), and it might be a slow operation. ps aux or a similar command (as suggested by perldoc -f random) is useless on this particular webhost due to their implementation.

This is for a game, though, so I may decide to implement a PRNG anyway. In that case, losing the random seed wouldn't matter.

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Re^3: A reproducible shuffle? ("stable shuffle") by moritz (Cardinal) on Feb 04, 2008 at 17:53 UTC
For a game the reseeding in my post is certainly enough. `/dev/random` usually contains really good random numbers, but reading it could block your scripts by seconds or even minutes if the machine is low on entropy. `/dev/urandom` is much faster, but contains less "real" entropy. So /dev/urandom or the last state from rand before setting the seed should be OK.	[reply] [d/l] [select]