OMG, why in the world do you need a field that 
will store the distance from us to the Andromeda 
galaxy in inches?  Just call CLOCK  as a seed 
value, it goes down to a tenth of a second, which 
might do it, I always used this in a loop to 
create random file names until flabelinfo didn't 
fail on the file name.  I seem to remember some 
random seed generator, but I can't remember the 
language or platform now, but I thought it was back on a series III

At 05:35 PM 12/12/2006, you wrote:
>
>I’m using the combination of the system date 
>(X8) and time (X8) as the  seed
>for the Cobol function RANDOM (e.g. 2006121309215430 may be the date/time
>combo seed). Works fine the first time it is 
>executed. The result being moved
>into a PIC S9(18) COMP field.
>The problem is that the next time around executing this routine the
>date/time combo may not have advanced any, 
>therefore giving me the same “random”
>number.
>I thought the date/time combo might be unique but obviously not. Then I
>thought  by pausing the program for  one second before getting the system
>date/time again might help things  along.
>The problem with that -- the run time of the program is  significantly
>increased.
>Has anyone any idea on how to pass a (more) unique seed number to the  random
>function?
>Any and all  suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
>TIA,
>Brian  Donaldson.
>
>
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Regards,

Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
www.thekompany.com
www.mindawn.com
949-713-3276

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