Re: Getting randomic integers

[startx <startx@...>]

On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:39:35 +0000
Rob Kendrick <rjek@rjek.com> wrote:

> I seem to recall that even /dev/random under OS X can be unsafe to
> use.  So much so that the man page even suggests that you feed it
> entropy before reading from it.
> 
> (A daemon is responsible for feeding entropy to it normally, but
> there's no easy way of knowing if that daemon is still running.)
> 

i assume by "unsafe" you mean "unreliable", meaning that if there is
not enought entropy it will block? thats the nature of /dev/random , if
you want non-blocking entropy /dev/urandom is what you need.

i have to say though that i'm not familiar with the details of that on
MacOS (assuming its basically BSD)

startx