Agreed. But I want a pseudorandom real _number_ in decimal, to use in a shell script, not just random bytes. I gave your solution a try. a=$(dd if=/dev/ura

Agreed. But I want a pseudorandom real _number_ in decimal, to use in a shell script, not just random bytes. I gave your solution a try. a=$(dd if=/dev/urandom bs=4 count=1|od -An -tx1|sed 's/ //g') printf %d\\n 0x$a