srand is used to initialize the random number generator.
The use of date / time to initialize the generator
means that the generated sequence of numbers “random” is.
<time.h> is for this example nessesary
/* * srand exmple code * http://code-reference.com/c/stdlib.h/srand */ #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <time.h> /* for time to initialize srand */ int main ( void ) { int i; /* initialize random generator */ srand ( (unsigned int) time(NULL) ); /* comment it out to see what happend */ /* random number */ for(i=0; i<=5; i++){ printf("example %i, for srand = %d\n",i, rand()); } return 0; }
user@host:~/code-reference.com# ./srand example 0, for srand = 796883283 example 1, for srand = 1140159597 example 2, for srand = 137384045 example 3, for srand = 1204700693 example 4, for srand = 763425562 example 5, for srand = 472690191