Philippe Meunier wrote: > Looking at the cvs log for jot.c, this seems to be a known change: > > "revision 1.27 [...] Internally, jot -r now uses arc4random_uniform() > whenever this is clearly possible. In particular `jot -r 1 10 20' > yields an unbiased random number between 10 and 20 (both ends > inclusive) from the shell." > > I only discovered this change today after noticing that one of my > shell scripts that used to work fine had started to fail with a low > probability: the script uses jot(1) to generate a sequence of random > array indexes, and with this change an index can now be out of bounds > with a probability of about 1/1700. Fortunately it isn't an important > script but given the low probability of failure it wasn't exactly fun > to debug. Anyway, I don't know which one of jot or jot's man page is > going to be fixed but I'd advocate for reverting to the previous > behavior to preserve the semantics of scripts that rely on it.
The current behavior seems far better (though I realize it's different.) I have difficulty understanding what the man page is trying to say. Something about expect the unexpected I think. I'd much rather delete all that nonsense.
