naim@eecs.nwu.edu (Naim Abdullah) (10/22/88)
Has anybody noticed that the 4.3 bsd fortune(6) program is very
nonrandom ? If both your ".login" and ".logout" files call
fortune, you frequently see the same fortune being printed when
you logout of one system and then rlogin into another. It seems
that fortune is not making "full use" of the process id and other
pseudo random cookies in generating it's random numbers.
Also, the "-o" option frequently repeats a favoured set of fortunes.
If you read the fortunes database you find many, that fortune (almost)
never prints while often repeating a choice few.
If anybody has fixes to make fortune more random, they'll be gratefully
accepted.
Thank you.
Naim Abdullah
Dept. of EECS,
Northwestern University
Internet: naim@eecs.nwu.edu
Uucp: {oddjob, chinet, att}!nucsrl!naim