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From Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium

     The formal name of this article is /dev/random, but has been renamed due to technical limitations of the MediaWiki system.

In Unix and Unix-like operating systems, /dev/random is a special file, which serves as a generator of random numbers. This can be either a truly random number, generated from system noise such as device drivers, or a pseudorandom number generator, in which the numbers are not truly random, but based on an algorithm which creates a diverse range of numbers.

Related topics

• /dev/null