Mastering Go - Second Edition

Reading from /dev/random

In this section, you will learn how to read from the /dev/random system device. The purpose of the /dev/random system device is to generate random data, which you might use for testing your programs or, in this case, as the seed for a random number generator. Getting data from /dev/random can be a little bit tricky, and this is the main reason for specifically discussing it here.

On a macOS Mojave machine, the /dev/random file has the following permissions:

$ ls -l /dev/random
crw-rw-rw-  1 root  wheel   14,   0 Mar  12 20:24 /dev/random
  

Similarly, on a Debian Linux machine, the /dev/random system device has the following UNIX file permissions:

$ ls -l /dev/random
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 8 Oct 13 12:19 /dev/random