RANDOM(1)

💖 RANDOM(1) — numrandom, bestie edition 💖

okay so this page lives in the User Contributed Perl Documentation section of your man pages, and it's all about numrandom. yes that's RANDOM(1), no cap. grab a snack, we're doing this. 🍓

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✨ NAME ✨

numrandom — prints out a random number. that's it. that's the whole job. iconic honestly. 👑

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

numrandom [-dhV] /[expression]/

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so basically, numrandom prints out a random number, and which number it picks is decided by the expression you hand it. 💅

the syntax and the program itself are nearly identical to the numrange program — like, siblings fr fr — except that numrandom picks a number at random out of the range expression instead of doing the numrange thing.

if you don't give it an expression at all? it'll print out a random integer between 1 and 100. and no, ranges here are inclusive — both ends count, bestie, we're not doing that exclusive nonsense here. 🌈

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⭐ OPTIONS ⭐

• -h — Help: you're literally looking at it right now. hi. 👋
• -V — Increase verbosity. more words. more drama. more info. 🔥
• -d — Debug mode. for developers. 🙈

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🌸 EXAMPLES 🌸

a 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, that's the whole trick:

$ 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

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😭 BUGS 😭

numrandom is slow when it's dealing with large ranges and has to randomly find a number from them. this is because it creates a list of all the potential numbers before picking one. so yeah — for large ranges it can be memory intensive. it's giving "making a whole guest list just to invite one person." 💀

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

numaverage(1), numbound(1), numinterval(1), numnormalize(1), numgrep(1), numprocess(1), numsum(1), numrange(1), numround(1)

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👑 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. (yes, "submitions." we're keeping it exactly as written, don't come for me. 🙈)

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🌈 MORE INFO 🌈

more info on numrandom can be found at:

http://suso.suso.org/xulu/Num-utils

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! ✨ this one was documented by perl v5.30.3 and it's dated 2020-06-09 — shoutout to that exact moment in time for giving us this little random number machine. go forth and get your numbers, u got this 💖🎀🦋