Do not use srand()/rand() if better alternatives exist (mirabilos) arc4random(3) is a self-seeding PRNG available on a lot of OSes (all BSDs, Darwin / Mac OSX, Interix / Microsoft® Services for Unix, Windows® 2003SR1, Windows® Vista, Debian with the new libbsd package installed, ???) and much better than srand(3)/rand(3). Thanks to GNU autoconf, this can be made portable. http://www.mirbsd.org/man/arc4random.3 //mirabilos