This package contains the full source code for the randword random word generator. The use of this software is granted upon the agreement to give the original author credit where applicable. In other words, if you use my code, let me and the people using your software know you did!

If you implement a new feature and want me to merge it into my version send me what I need to know to make the changes including your name and email so I can give you appropriate credit as well.

Enjoy!

This tool is something similar to a monkey sitting at a keyboard pressing random characters. Given the constraints passed to the program from the command line the application first randomly decides how long the next randomly generated string will be. Then the program adds random characters to a string of the predetermined length until the string is full. Finally, the application checks the string against its dictionaries to determine if the randomly generated string is an actual word in the English language.

Of note, randword was initially created in 1997 by me (Erik Gillespie) and Keith Batten. I have completely overhauled the program since then to add more functionality, restructure and convert the code from C++ to C (C++ is my best guess, it was clearly newbie code :).

In order for randword to run correctly the dictionary files must exist in a subfolder called 'dict' relative to the current working directory. The dictionary files must be named word03.txt, word04.txt, ..., word20.txt. The dictionaries are expected to contain words of a certain length and those words must be all lower-case ASCII and each on a line of their own with only a newline at the end of each line, no carriage return/linefeed pairs. Go to my homepage (see the link at the bottom of this document) to download a sample dictionary.

Here's the output of randword's --help option:

Usage : randword [options] filename

Displays a list of randomly generated words.

  -d               Keep the dictionary on the disk when searching
  -h arg           Stop after arg words are generated.
  -l arg           Stop after arg length word is found.
  -m arg           Sets the minimum word length (default = 3).
  -M arg           Sets the maximum word length (default = 20).
  -q               Quiet mode.  Only print words found in the dictionary.
  -v               Verbose mode.  Print all randomly generated strings.
  -w arg           Stop after specified word is generated.
  --help           Displays this help message and exits.
  --version        Displays randword's version information and exits.

Send bugs and comments to Erik Gillespie [email protected].

If you're curious about some of the technical features in the code, randword runs in Linux and DOS (I've only tested in Windows 2000's command prompt however). The dictionaries can be searched on the disk or all in memory using a binary search. The binary search is pretty fast but searching on the disk is much slower than searching in memory. Also, if you run randword with no arguments then randword will run indefinitely if you let it. randword does catch the interrupt signal (SIGINT) though so in the correct environment (again I've only tested in Linux and Windows 2000's command prompt) you can press Ctrl-C to terminate the program and randword will exit gracefully, reporting the number of random strings generated, the number of words found, and the number of non-words found.

• All needed dictionaries are preloaded into memory and searched there instead of from the disk. I noticed a 13-14 time speed-up by doing this on my computer.
• Added option '-d' to use old method of searching dictionaries on the disk. randword uses less memory that way in case you're running on an older computer or when you just need the extra resources.
• The Win32 version of randword outputs carriage-return/line-feed pairs instead of just line-feeds. In any other OS randword will output line-feeds.
• Fixed an incorrect technical detail in this document.

If you want to get a hold of me to request a feature, put in a bug report, make comments (I like getting emails that people actually use my programs :) then send me an email at [email protected].

You can always get the newest version of randword on Github: https://github.com/egillespie/