NUMRANDOM(1) User Contributed Perl Documentation NUMRANDOM(1)NAME
numrandom - Print out a random number.
SYNOPSIS
numrandom [-dhV] /[expression]/
DESCRIPTION
numrandom will print out a random number determined by the expression that you give. The syntax and program is nearly identical to the
numrange program, except that numrandom picks a number at random from the range expression. If no expression is specified, numrandom will
print out a random integer between 1 and 100. Ranges are inclusive.
OPTIONS -h Help: You're looking at it.
-V Increase verbosity.
-d Debug mode. For developers
EXAMPLES
Random number from 1 to 10.
$ numrandom /1..10/
7
From 1 to 10 or from 15 to 20.
$ numrandom /1..10,15..20/
16
An even number from 0 to 10
$ numrandom /0..10i2/
4
An odd number. Notice the starting number in the range.
$ numrandom /1..10i2/
9
A factor of 3 between 99 and 120.
$ numrandom /99..120i3/
111
A decimal number.
$ numrandom /1.1..2.5i0.1/
1.8
A negative random number.
$ numrandom /0.0..-2.0i0.3/
-0.8
BUGS
numrandom is slow when dealing with large ranges to randomly find a number from. This is because it creates a list of all potential
numbers before picking one. So it can be memory intensive for large ranges.
SEE ALSO numaverage(1), numbound(1), numinterval(1), numnormalize(1), numgrep(1), numprocess(1), numsum(1), numrange(1), numround(1)COPYRIGHT
numrandom is part of the num-utils package, which is copyrighted by Suso Banderas and released under the GPL license. Please read the
COPYING and LICENSE files that came with the num-utils package
Developers can read the GOALS file and contact me about providing
submitions or help for the project.
MORE INFO
More info on numrandom can be found at:
http://suso.suso.org/programs/num-utils/
perl v5.10.1 2009-10-31 NUMRANDOM(1)
Check Out this Related Man Page
String::Random(3pm) User Contributed Perl Documentation String::Random(3pm)NAME
String::Random - Perl module to generate random strings based on a pattern
SYNOPSIS
use String::Random;
$foo = new String::Random;
print $foo->randregex('ddd'); # Prints 3 random digits
print $foo->randpattern("..."); # Prints 3 random printable characters
or
use String::Random qw(random_regex random_string);
print random_regex('ddd'); # Also prints 3 random digits
print random_string("..."); # Also prints 3 random printable characters
DESCRIPTION
This module makes it trivial to generate random strings.
As an example, let's say you are writing a script that needs to generate a random password for a user. The relevant code might look
something like this:
use String::Random;
$pass = new String::Random;
print "Your password is ", $pass->randpattern("CCcc!ccn"), "
";
This would output something like this:
Your password is UDwp$tj5
If you are more comfortable dealing with regular expressions, the following code would have a similar result:
use String::Random;
$pass = new String::Random;
print "Your password is ",
$pass->randregex('[A-Z]{2}[a-z]{2}.[a-z]{2}d'), "
";
Patterns
The pre-defined patterns (for use with "randpattern()" and "random_pattern()") are as follows:
c Any lowercase character [a-z]
C Any uppercase character [A-Z]
n Any digit [0-9]
! A punctuation character [~`!@$%^&*()-_+={}[]|:;"'.<>?/#,]
. Any of the above
s A "salt" character [A-Za-z0-9./]
b Any binary data
These can be modified, but if you need a different pattern it is better to create another pattern, possibly using one of the pre-defined as
a base. For example, if you wanted a pattern "A" that contained all upper and lower case letters ("[A-Za-z]"), the following would work:
$foo = new String::Random;
$foo->{'A'} = [ 'A'..'Z', 'a'..'z' ];
or
$foo = new String::Random;
$foo->{'A'} = [ @{$foo->{'C'}}, @{$foo->{'c'}} ];
The random_string function, described below, has an alternative interface for adding patterns.
Methods
new
new max => number
Create a new String::Random object.
Optionally a parameter "max" can be included to specify the maximum number of characters to return for "*" and other regular
expression patters that don't return a fixed number of characters.
randpattern LIST
The randpattern method returns a random string based on the concatenation of all the pattern strings in the list.
It will return a list of random strings corresponding to the pattern strings when used in list context.
randregex LIST
The randregex method returns a random string that will match the regular expression passed in the list argument.
Please note that the arguments to randregex are not real regular expressions. Only a small subset of regular expression syntax is
actually supported. So far, the following regular expression elements are supported:
w Alphanumeric + "_".
d Digits.
W Printable characters other than those in w.
D Printable characters other than those in d.
. Printable characters.
[] Character classes.
{} Repetition.
* Same as {0,}.
? Same as {0,1}.
+ Same as {1,}.
Regular expression support is still somewhat incomplete. Currently special characters inside [] are not supported (with the
exception of "-" to denote ranges of characters). The parser doesn't care for spaces in the "regular expression" either.
Functions
random_string PATTERN,LIST
random_string PATTERN
When called with a single scalar argument, random_string returns a random string using that scalar as a pattern. Optionally,
references to lists containing other patterns can be passed to the function. Those lists will be used for 0 through 9 in the
pattern (meaning the maximum number of lists that can be passed is 10). For example, the following code:
print random_string("0101",
["a", "b", "c"],
["d", "e", "f"]), "
";
would print something like this:
cebd
BUGS
This is Bug Free(TM) code. (At least until somebody finds one...)
AUTHOR
Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>
SEE ALSO perl(1).
perl v5.10.0 2009-06-11 String::Random(3pm)