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Asked: 2026-05-20T08:47:24+00:00

I am creating a pastebin app and I want the pastes’ IDs to be

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I am creating a pastebin app and I want the pastes’ IDs to be truly random. /dev/random on Linux (hosted on a Linux machine) uses noise so it’s output is truly random.

Currently I use this code to generate the IDs:

self.guid = Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(Time.new.to_s + (0...50).map{ ('a'..'z').to_a[rand(26)] }.join)

Does Ruby’s rand function use /dev/random, and if not how can I use /dev/random in Ruby? Thanks.

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  1. Editorial Team

    The hardly documented SecureRandom (standard lib in ruby 1.9.2) uses OpenSSL (which is faster than urandom), if not available it uses urandom, last it checks if win32’s random is
    available. If none you’ll get an error.
    It has nice features:

    require 'securerandom'
puts SecureRandom.urlsafe_base64(50)
#=> thgv48AT_gGcYD3xx-lCqRWjoAFqN3pm2ZBKOZPZP2BC0aSMD5rXg1EaPzKLbJMMt4Y
puts SecureRandom.uuid
#=> 2670f82a-0aee-41a8-93c5-2d08e2c608db

    (uuid: RFC 4122)

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