> Thanks, I fixed this now in my bzr tree and it will be part of the > next upload.
Er, assuming that's revision 2269: http://anonscm.debian.org/loggerhead/apt/debian-sid/revision/2269/debian/apt.cron.daily You don't need the final "cut -c1-5". It is true that cksum returns an unsigned 32-bit number, and some shells only do 32-bit signed math, but they simply convert the number to negative. You either mask off the sign bit with RANDOM=$(($(dd if=/dev/urandom bs=2 count=1 2> /dev/null | cksum | cut -d' ' -f1) % 0x7fffffff)) Or, of you want to emulate the range of Bash $RANDOM exactly: RANDOM=$(($(dd if=/dev/urandom bs=2 count=1 2> /dev/null | cksum | cut -d' ' -f1) % 0x7fff)) The "od -d -N2 -An" solution works with a recent enough od. I was looking to see how old that can be. The uppercase option flags are not in 7th edition, but are in POSIX.1 as of 2001: http://www.unix.com/man-page/posix/0/od/ It also appears to be in xpg4: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19963-01/html/821-1461/od-1.html And in SunOD 5.8 (2000): http://www.manpages.info/sunos/od.1.html GNU textutils 2.0 (1999): http://sunsite.ualberta.ca/Documentation/Gnu/textutils-2.0/man/od.1.html Apparently the spec was in POSIX.1 as of 1992, alyhough not NetBSD as of 2000: http://gnats.netbsd.org/11204 It was added to NetBSD in 2008: http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/usr.bin/hexdump/od.1?rev=1.23&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&f=H&only_with_tag=MAIN -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org