Calling the time function in a C program

[cdietschrun]

I have a program that I needed to create for a homework that is an Operating System Simulator. It's not as cool as it sounds. When I run it,

  
  long now ;

  srand( system( "time(&now)" ) );

Is supposed to create a value that will initialize the "system clock" ( a static int ).

The program runs and does what it is supposed to, except there is no randomness in the results ( there should be differences in the amount of "time units", which are measured in blocks of time that is affected by this function call I believe.

Anyone help me make sure I'm doing this right? It's supposed to put that random # in the variable "now".

[cdietschrun]

I have my entire code if someone wants to read it and tell me why I'm not getting random outputs, that works too.

[gpraghuram]

I have a program that I needed to create for a homework that is an Operating System Simulator. It's not as cool as it sounds. When I run it,

  
  long now ;

  srand( system( "time(&now)" ) );

Is supposed to create a value that will initialize the "system clock" ( a static int ).

The program runs and does what it is supposed to, except there is no randomness in the results ( there should be differences in the amount of "time units", which are measured in blocks of time that is affected by this function call I believe.

Anyone help me make sure I'm doing this right? It's supposed to put that random # in the variable "now".

are you calling seed() function before calling this?

Raghuram

[cdietschrun]

No, I'm confused by this whole setup. It is from a book and it is 20 years old and they don't explain their code. Our job is to type it in and get it to work in ANSI C and they throw little things like this in there that I can't quite figure out.

[Banfa]

are you calling seed() function before calling this?

srand IS the seed function for the PRNG.

[Banfa]

  
  long now ;

  srand( system( "time(&now)" ) );

This code is not right I think you mean

  
  long now ;

  srand( time(&now) );

But you should read up on system and time so that you understand exactly what they do.