.rnd

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sat, 2011-03-05 at 17:41 -0700, Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 2011-03-05 at 15:28 -0700, Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
> >> There is a file in my home directory called .rnd. I presume it is the
> >> seed for a random number generator. What program creates/uses it? I ran
> >> yum provides */.rnd and nothing at all turned up.
> > ----
> > yum only would know of files installed by yum packages themselves and
> > never really knows about user generated files so it's hardly surprising
> > that yum is in the dark about the origin of this file.
> > 
> > If you really, really want to know, which program, then you could try
> > this...
> > 
> > mv ~/.rnd ~/.rnd-bak # moves the rnd file
> > touch ~/.rnd     # creates 0 length file
> > chattr +i ~/.rnd # sets immutable bit
> > 
> > and hope that whichever program that uses this file complains loudly
> > 
> > and you can change this back by...
> > 
> > chattr -i ~/.rnd
> > rm ~/.rnd
> > mv ~/.rnd-bak ~/.rnd
> > 
> > Craig
> > 
> > 
> 
> Yeah, I do really, really want to know, to satisfy long-standing curiosity 
> (and learn how the random number generator might serve me), but I will keep 
> your suggestion on hold for the time being, in the hope that someone will be 
> able to provide a direct answer to the identity of the program that created 
> it.

You could also try the inotify-tools package, though inotify doesn't
seem to record the pid of processes which cause watched events.

poc