Deviant "srand" behavior

[ghost]

With every commonly used implementation:

• gawk
• gawk --posix
• mawk 1.3.3
• nawk

Running "srand" gives you the unix timestamp:

$ awk 'BEGIN {srand(); print srand()}'
1527387405

However Mawk 1.3.4 gives something else:

$ mawk 'BEGIN {srand(); printf "%.0f\n", srand()}'
13171862908218520

[ThomasDickey]

It's a configuration option:

https://invisible-island.net/mawk/CHANGES.html#t20140914

        + change default for configure option --enable-init-srand to enable
          this (discussion with Mike Brennan).
        + add -W random option to set initial srand() seed.
...
        + modify initialization of srand default seed from time of day to use
          gettimeofday, etc., so that successive runs of mawk are less likely
          to use the same seed value (suggested by Mike Brennan).

By the way, there's always a patch-date associated with mawk 1.3.4+

[ghost]

I mostly use PHP now as I grew tired of AWK shortcomings. Closing this.