From: Jason Alexander <jalex AT ea DOT oac DOT uci DOT edu>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Automatically seeding random numbers
Date: Tue, 03 Feb 1998 22:10:42 -0800
Organization: University of California, Irvine
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  Please excuse my asking what is probably a simple question, but since
I'm teaching myself how to program in C using djgpp, I don't yet know
how to figure out this problem.

  Basically, I'd like a program to (automatically) seed srand() with a
different value each time the program is run. (Currently I require the
user to type in a seed, which is a nuisance.)  Initially, I thought
something as simple as srand(clock()) would work, but then I found out
that clock() only returns the number of clock ticks since the *last*
call of clock(), so clock() always returns the value 0 when called for
the first time.

  Is there, say, a way to get the number of milliseconds after the last
minute or something like that?
  More generally, what is the preferred way of automatically generating
such a seed?

Thanks,

Jason