Re: Controlling ('rand') random number upper limit

On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Jim Langston wrote:

> According to the documentation, rand returns a number from 0 to RAND_MAX,
> and I'm not sure what RAND_MAX is defined as, most likely 32767, 65535,
> or some other such number.  With rand it has always been necessary to
> do some math calculations to return the number you want.

I *think* you can do:

#define RAND_MAX <some upper bound>

and change RAND_MAX for your application.

If you are thinking about writing your own function to handle this stuff
take at look at the source code to the "random" program on a Slackware
linux distribution.  This handy little program can take as an argument an
upper bound and return a random number between 0 and (upper bound - 1).
Of course you shouldn't copy any of the code into your function unless you
plan on publishing it under the GPL (unless you don't plan on ever
distributing your work either).

<off topic side note>
I just used the random program at home in a bash script to choose mp3's at
random and play them from cron.  Pretty good alarm clock :)
</off topic side note>

James Rich
james@eaerich.com

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