frand: A floating point random number generator

frand is a simple commandline tool that generates random floating point numbers. It is implemented with mwc-random.

Installing

This program is currently not published to Hackage. Please download an archive from https://github.com/matil019/frand/releases (look for a tar.gz link) and extract it to a directory. Or alternatively, clone this repository.

After that, use the cabal-install tool to build and install frand.

cabal v2-update
cabal v2-install . --overwrite-policy=always

--overwrite-policy=always is not necessary, but we recommend it because it makes easier to install newer versions. The tool will be installed at ~/.cabal/bin/frand.

Examples of usage

Uniformly generate a random number in an interval [1, 5]:

$ frand uniform 1 5
4.551609505727284

Generate five random numbers with a normal distribution of mean 5 and standard deviation 2:

$ frand normal --num 5 5 2
5.235272117068453
4.64985889420898
7.060698043923342
4.834412934580578
6.105681218321858

Generate a random number with a given seed for reproducible random numbers:

$ echo foo > seedfile
$ frand normal --seed-in seedfile 5 2
6.585815226312909
$ frand normal --seed-in seedfile 5 2
6.585815226312909

Try frand --help, frand normal --help, etc. for more exhaustive explanation of the commandline options.