Is there a function to generate a random int number in C? Or will I have to use a third party library?
31 Answers
Note: Don't use
rand()for security. If you need a cryptographically secure number, see this answer instead.
#include <time.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
srand(time(NULL)); // Initialization, should only be called once.
int r = rand(); // Returns a pseudo-random integer between 0 and RAND_MAX.
On Linux, you might prefer to use random and srandom.
The rand() function in <stdlib.h> returns a pseudo-random integer between 0 and RAND_MAX. You can use srand(unsigned int seed) to set a seed.
It's common practice to use the % operator in conjunction with rand() to get a different range (though bear in mind that this throws off the uniformity somewhat). For example:
/* random int between 0 and 19 */
int r = rand() % 20;
If you really care about uniformity you can do something like this:
/* Returns an integer in the range [0, n).
*
* Uses rand(), and so is affected-by/affects the same seed.
*/
int randint(int n) {
if ((n - 1) == RAND_MAX) {
return rand();
} else {
// Supporting larger values for n would requires an even more
// elaborate implementation that combines multiple calls to rand()
assert (n <= RAND_MAX)
// Chop off all of the values that would cause skew...
int end = RAND_MAX / n; // truncate skew
assert (end > 0);
end *= n;
// ... and ignore results from rand() that fall above that limit.
// (Worst case the loop condition should succeed 50% of the time,
// so we can expect to bail out of this loop pretty quickly.)
int r;
while ((r = rand()) >= end);
return r % n;
}
}
If you need better quality pseudo random numbers than what stdlib provides, check out Mersenne Twister. It's faster, too. Sample implementations are plentiful, for example here.
STL doesn't exist for C. You have to call rand, or better yet, random. These are declared in the standard library header stdlib.h. rand is POSIX, random is a BSD spec function.
The difference between rand and random is that random returns a much more usable 32-bit random number, and rand typically returns a 16-bit number. The BSD manpages show that the lower bits of rand are cyclic and predictable, so rand is potentially useless for small numbers.
Have a look at ISAAC (Indirection, Shift, Accumulate, Add, and Count). Its uniformly distributed and has an average cycle length of 2^8295.
Well, STL is C++, not C, so I don't know what you want. If you want C, however, there is the rand() and srand() functions:
int rand(void);
void srand(unsigned seed);
These are both part of ANSI C. There is also the random() function:
long random(void);
But as far as I can tell, random() is not standard ANSI C. A third-party library may not be a bad idea, but it all depends on how random of a number you really need to generate.
You want to use rand(). Note (VERY IMPORTANT): make sure to set the seed for the rand function. If you do not, your random numbers are not truly random. This is very, very, very important. Thankfully, you can usually use some combination of the system ticks timer and the date to get a good seed.
FWIW, the answer is that yes, there is a stdlib.h function called rand; this function is tuned primarily for speed and distribution, not for unpredictability. Almost all built-in random functions for various languages and frameworks use this function by default. There are also "cryptographic" random number generators that are much less predictable, but run much slower. These should be used in any sort of security-related application.
rand() is the most convenient way to generate random numbers.
You may also catch random number from any online service like random.org.
On modern x86_64 CPUs you can use the hardware random number generator via _rdrand64_step()
Example code:
#include <immintrin.h>
uint64_t randVal;
if(!_rdrand64_step(&randVal)) {
// Report an error here: random number generation has failed!
}
// If no error occured, randVal contains a random 64-bit number
Despite all the people suggestion rand() here, you don't want to use rand() unless you have to! The random numbers that rand() produces are often very bad. To quote from the Linux man page:
The versions of
rand()andsrand()in the Linux C Library use the same random number generator asrandom(3)andsrandom(3), so the lower-order bits should be as random as the higher-order bits. However, on older rand() implementations, and on current implementations on different systems, the lower-order bits are much less random than the higher-order bits. Do not use this function in applications intended to be portable when good randomness is needed. (Userandom(3)instead.)
Regarding portability, random() is also defined by the POSIX standard for quite some time now. rand() is older, it appeared already in the first POSIX.1 spec (IEEE Std 1003.1-1988), whereas random() first appeared in POSIX.1-2001 (IEEE Std 1003.1-2001), yet the current POSIX standard is already POSIX.1-2008 (IEEE Std 1003.1-2008), which received an update just a year ago (IEEE Std 1003.1-2008, 2016 Edition). So I would consider random() to be very portable.
POSIX.1-2001 also introduced the lrand48() and mrand48() functions, see here:
This family of functions shall generate pseudo-random numbers using a linear congruential algorithm and 48-bit integer arithmetic.
And a pretty good pseudo random source is the arc4random() function that is available on many systems. Not part of any official standard, appeared in BSD around 1997 but you can find it on systems like Linux and macOS/iOS.
#include<stdio.h>
#include<stdlib.h>
#include<time.h>
//generate number in range [min,max)
int random(int min, int max){
int number = min + rand() % (max - min);
return number;
}
//Driver code
int main(){
srand(time(NULL));
for(int i = 1; i <= 10; i++){
printf("%d\t", random(10, 100));
}
return 0;
}
For Linux C applications:
This is my reworked code from an answer above that follows my C code practices and returns a random buffer of any size (with proper return codes, etc.). Make sure to call urandom_open() once at the beginning of your program.
int gUrandomFd = -1;
int urandom_open(void)
{
if (gUrandomFd == -1) {
gUrandomFd = open("/dev/urandom", O_RDONLY);
}
if (gUrandomFd == -1) {
fprintf(stderr, "Error opening /dev/urandom: errno [%d], strerrer [%s]\n",
errno, strerror(errno));
return -1;
} else {
return 0;
}
}
void urandom_close(void)
{
close(gUrandomFd);
gUrandomFd = -1;
}
//
// This link essentially validates the merits of /dev/urandom:
// http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/02/25/safely-generate-random-numbers/
//
int getRandomBuffer(uint8_t *buf, int size)
{
int ret = 0; // Return value
if (gUrandomFd == -1) {
fprintf(stderr, "Urandom (/dev/urandom) file not open\n");
return -1;
}
ret = read(gUrandomFd, buf, size);
if (ret != size) {
fprintf(stderr, "Only read [%d] bytes, expected [%d]\n",
ret, size);
return -1;
} else {
return 0;
}
}
Here is my approach (a wrapper around rand()):
I also scale to allow a case where min is INT_MIN and max is INT_MAX, which is normally not possible with rand() alone since it returns values from 0 to RAND_MAX, inclusive (1/2 that range).
Use it like this:
const int MIN = 1;
const int MAX = 1024;
// Get a pseudo-random number between MIN and MAX, **inclusive**.
// Seeding of the pseudo-random number generator automatically occurs
// the very first time you call it.
int random_num = utils_rand(MIN, MAX);
Definitions and doxygen descriptions:
#include <assert.h>
#include <stdbool.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
/// \brief Use linear interpolation to rescale, or "map" value `val` from range
/// `in_min` to `in_max`, inclusive, to range `out_min` to `out_max`, inclusive.
/// \details Similar to Arduino's ingenious `map()` function:
/// https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/language/functions/math/map/
///
/// TODO(gabriel): turn this into a gcc statement expression instead to prevent the potential for
/// the "double evaluation" bug. See `MIN()` and `MAX()` above.
#define UTILS_MAP(val, in_min, in_max, out_min, out_max) \
(((val) - (in_min)) * ((out_max) - (out_min)) / ((in_max) - (in_min)) + (out_min))
/// \brief Obtain a pseudo-random integer value between `min` and `max`, **inclusive**.
/// \details 1. If `(max - min + 1) > RAND_MAX`, then the range of values returned will be
/// **scaled** to the range `max - min + 1`, and centered over the center of the
/// range at `(min + max)/2`. Scaling the numbers means that in the case of scaling,
/// not all numbers can even be reached. However, you will still be assured to have
/// a random distribution of numbers across the full range.
/// 2. Also, the first time per program run that you call this function, it will
/// automatically seed the pseudo-random number generator with your system's
/// current time in seconds.
/// \param[in] min The minimum pseudo-random number you'd like, inclusive. Can be positive
/// OR negative.
/// \param[in] max The maximum pseudo-random number you'd like, inclusive. Can be positive
/// OR negative.
/// \return A pseudo-random integer value between `min` and `max`, **inclusive**.
int utils_rand(int min, int max)
{
static bool first_run = true;
if (first_run)
{
// seed the pseudo-random number generator with the seconds time the very first run
time_t time_now_sec = time(NULL);
srand(time_now_sec);
first_run = false;
}
int range = max - min + 1;
int random_num = rand(); // random num from 0 to RAND_MAX, inclusive
if (range > RAND_MAX)
{
static_assert(
sizeof(long int) > sizeof(int),
"This must be true or else the below mapping/scaling may have undefined overflow "
"and not work properly. In such a case, try casting to `long long int` instead of "
"just `long int`, and update this static_assert accordingly.");
random_num = UTILS_MAP((long int)random_num, (long int)0, (long int)RAND_MAX, (long int)min,
(long int)max);
return random_num;
}
// This is presumably a faster approach than the map/scaling function above, so do this faster
// approach below whenever you don't **have** to do the more-complicated approach above.
random_num %= range;
random_num += min;
return random_num;
}
See also:
- [I discovered this Q&A after writing my answer above, but it is obviously very relevant, and they do the same thing I do for the non-scaling range case] How do I get a specific range of numbers from rand()?
- [I NEED TO STUDY AND READ THIS ANSWER MORE STILL--seems to have some good points about retaining good randomness by not using modulus alone] How do I get a specific range of numbers from rand()?
If you need, say, 128 secure random bits, the RFC 1750 compliant solution is to read hardware source that is known to generate useable bits of entropy (such as a spinning disk). Better yet, good implementations should combine multiple sources using a mixing function, and finally de-skew the distribution of their output, by re-mapping or deleting outputs.
If you need more bits than that, the compliant thing to do is start with sequence of 128 secure random bits and stretch it to a desired length, map it to human readable text, etc.
If you want to generate a secure random number in C I would follow the source code here:
Note that for Windows BCryptGenRandom is used, not CryptGenRandom which has become unsecure within the past two decades. You can confirm for yourself that BCryptGenRandom is compliant with RFC 1750.
For POSIX-compliant operating systems, e.g. Ubuntu (a flavor of Linux), you can simply read from /dev/urandom or /dev/random, which is a file-like interface to a device that generates bits of entropy by combining multiple sources in an RFC 1750 compliant fashion. You can read a desired number of bytes from these "files" with read or fread just like you would any other file, but note that reads from /dev/random will block until a enough new bits of entropy are available, whereas /dev/urandom will not, which can be a security issue. You can get around that by checking the size of the available entropy pool, either my reading from entropy_avail, or by using ioctl.
The glibc-specific function (that should be found in most of Linux environments) related to this is random(), or you may be interested with its thread-safe version random_r(). You have to initialize the struct random_data with initstate_r() prior to passing it to random_r().
Here is quick code sample :
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <time.h>
void xxx (void) {
unsigned int seed = (unsigned int) time(NULL);
char rnd_state[17] = {0};
struct random_data rnd_st_buf = {0};
initstate_r(seed, &rnd_state[0], 17, &rnd_st_buf);
for(size_t idx = 0; idx < 8; idx++) {
int32_t rnd_int = 0;
char rnd_seq_str[6] = {0};
random_r(&rnd_st_buf, &rnd_int);
memcpy((char *)&rnd_seq_str[0], (char *)&rnd_int, 4);
printf("random number : 0x%08x, \n", rnd_int);
}
}
You can generate random chars, then view them as int :
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
typedef double rand_type; // change double to int
rand_type my_rand() {
char buff[sizeof(rand_type)];
for (size_t i = 0 ; i < sizeof(rand_type) ; ++i)
buff[i] = (char) rand();
return *(rand_type *) buff;
}
int main() {
int i ; // srand as you want
for (i = 0 ; i < 10 ; ++i)
printf("%g\n", my_rand()); // change %g to %d
return 0 ;
}
You can use the concept of a dangling pointer.
A pointer pointing to a memory location that has been deleted (or freed) is called dangling pointer.
It will show random values while printing.
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