random/urandom

[hictio]

hi there, last night i found out 2 strange files, `random` and `urandom`,both of them in the /dev directory.
they appear, under a ls -l, listed with a size of `1,`; i never saw that type of nomenklature before, and when i tried to do a `more` on then, the terminal freezes until i hit `crtl z`, the `file` program reports `character special`. my question is, what are those files? can i redirect they output, if they produce any, to see the computer produce random data, is that so?.
thanks in advance.

[Vernon Frazee]

http://hermes.rz.tu-clausthal.de/cgi...urandom.4.html

[hictio]

thanks vernon, perhaps many of the questions i post here a truly basic and only a man page away, but, i don´t know why, i can´t read my man pages, perhaps my distributions doesn´t include them...
nevertheless, i`m totally surprised by the speed of the answers of this forum, thanks.

[mikek147]

So we meet again.

/dev/random and /dev/urandom are kernel random number source devices. An example of a use for /dev/random is in the use of making a password as:

head -c8 /dev/random | uuencode -m - | sed -n '2s/=*$//;2p'

Hope this helps. -mk

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If it ain't broke, fix it till it is.

[hictio]

not only helps, but it expands my mind, linux is the greatest an most interesting thing that i found/learned in computing, so far; thanks a lot mike onefourseven.