plan9port/man/man3/genrandom.3
Russ Cox 977b25a76a tmac: introduce real manual reference macro instead of overloading IR
The overloading of IR emits magic \X'...' sequences that turn into HTML manual links.
But not all such IR invocations should be manual links;
those had to be written to avoid the IR macro before.
Worse, the \X'...' ending the IR causes troff to emit only a single space after a period.

Defining a new IM macro for manual references fixes both problems.

Fixes #441.
2020-08-13 23:43:43 -04:00

45 lines
886 B
Groff

.TH GENRANDOM 3
.SH NAME
genrandom, prng \- random number generation
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B #include <u.h>
.br
.B #include <libc.h>
.br
.B #include <mp.h>
.br
.B #include <libsec.h>
.PP
.B
void genrandom(uchar *buf, int nbytes)
.PP
.B
void prng(uchar *buf, int nbytes)
.SH DESCRIPTION
Most security software requires a source of random or, at the
very least, unguessable numbers.
.PP
.I Genrandom
fills a buffer with bytes from the X9.17 pseudo-random
number generator. The X9.17 generator is seeded by 24
truly random bytes read via
.I truerand
(see
.IM rand (3) ).
.PP
.I Prng
uses the native
.IM rand (3)
pseudo-random number generator to fill the buffer. Used with
.IR srand ,
this function can produce a reproducible stream of pseudo random
numbers useful in testing.
.PP
Both functions may be passed to
.I mprand
(see
.IM mp (3) ).
.SH SOURCE
.B \*9/src/libsec
.SH SEE ALSO
.IM mp (3)