Re: How can Emacs get a unique ID per Linux reboot?

Matthew Wilcox (Matthew.Wilcox@genedata.com)
Tue, 1 Jun 1999 17:58:18 +0200

On Tue, Jun 01, 1999 at 05:29:07PM +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> In muc.lists.linux-kernel, you wrote:
> On RedHat systems you could read /var/run/random-seed, the saved state from
> /dev/random on last reboot (with a sanity check that its mtime is <= /proc/uptime).
> It should be pretty unlikely that there are collisions because it is 512 bytes of
> random data. I don't know if other distributions have a similar mechanism.

Debian has it too, but:
-rw------- 1 root root 512 May 12 04:10 /var/run/random-seed
so you can only read it if you're root.

-- 
Matthew Wilcox <willy@bofh.ai>
"Windows and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of
specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a
painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture." - N Stephenson


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