Xenon refers to the random choice script I sent him, and asks:
# choose random remailers $first = rand($#remailers+1); $second = rand($#remailers); $second++ if $second >= $first;
1) Why not just $second = rand ($#remailers+1), instead of the two line $second routine? (And why did I have to add the +1...).
If there are N remailers, then $#remailers will be N-1. (It's the value of the last index into the array, but the array starts at zero.) rand($#remailers+1) is a floating point number in the range [0,N) (including 0, but not including N). Hey, we're missing some int() operations here; it should be like this:
# choose random remailers $first = int(rand($#remailers+1)); $second = int(rand($#remailers)); $second++ if $second >= $first;
Now, $first is an integer in the range [0,N-1], which is correct for indexing into the array of available remailers. When it comes to choosing $second, we do not want to choose the same value as $first; for example, if N is 5 then we want to choose $first from the set {0,1,2,3,4}, and if we happen to choose $first=2 then we want to choose $second from the set {0,1,3,4}. The two-line calculation of $second will do that.
2) How do I output the variables as csh environmental variables that stick around after the perl script has executed? I usually use 'setenv' but perl didn't like that.
You will have to have csh parse the output of the perl script. For example, have the perl script print some csh-compatible "setenv" commands, with something like print "setenv A$cycle $remailers[$first]\n"; print "setenv B$cycle $remailers[$second]\n"; and have the csh script execute the perl script and parse its output using something like this: eval `perl perl-script` BTW, don't ever write csh scripts. See Tom Christiansen's periodic FAQ posting in comp.unix.shell.
I may have screwed it up, as Alan originally had no +1 in the $first line, and had -1 in the next line, but it never outputed "Six" then.
That was a bug, which you fixed. --apb (Alan Barrett)