From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Jan 30 9:12:22 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1C77237B405 for ; Thu, 30 Jan 2003 09:12:21 -0800 (PST) Received: from dire.bris.ac.uk (dire.bris.ac.uk [137.222.10.60]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CBEC343F43 for ; Thu, 30 Jan 2003 09:12:19 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk) Received: from mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk by dire.bris.ac.uk with SMTP-PRIV with ESMTP; Thu, 30 Jan 2003 17:11:53 +0000 Received: from cmjg (helo=localhost) by mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk with local-esmtp (Exim 3.16 #1) id 18eIDk-0006sN-00; Thu, 30 Jan 2003 17:11:24 +0000 Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2003 17:11:24 +0000 (GMT) From: Jan Grant X-X-Sender: cmjg@mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk To: Mike Meyer Cc: Ruben de Groot , Darren Pilgrim , Giorgos Keramidas , questions Subject: Re: Why no /dev/one? In-Reply-To: <15929.18601.542905.366283@guru.mired.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, Mike Meyer wrote: > In <20030130151339.GA17486@ei.bzerk.org>, Ruben de Groot typed: > > And while you're at it, what about /dev/yes and /dev/no to automate > > interactive scripts. Or, if you like the challenge, a /dev/fibonacci > > and a /dev/pi would be very welcome :) > > Yes, but is /dev/pi a suitable substite for /dev/random if you seek > far enough into it? Only if you don't tell anyone exactly how far you're seeking, and if you permit arbitrarily large file offsets. In that case, it's a source of randomness (in that an observer who didn't know the file offset couldn't predict with 100% accuracy the next digit) -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 http://ioctl.org/jan/ "Roger Penrose can never be convinced that this sentence is true." (If he doesn't get the joke, you can at least prove that he owes you money.) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message