Originally packaged for wip by evaldo - thanks!
ent is a program which applies various tests to sequences of
bytes stored in files and reports the results of those tests.
The program is useful for those evaluating pseudorandom number
generators for encryption and statistical sampling
applications, compression algorithms, and other applications
where the information density of a file is of interest.
(Modified by me only to hold the distfile in a DIST_SUBDIR, since
the random.zip filename has the possibility to clash with other things)
An example of its usage:
% dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1k count=10 | ent
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10240 bytes transferred in 0.001 secs (10240000 bytes/sec)
Entropy = 7.977398 bits per byte.
Optimum compression would reduce the size
of this 10240 byte file by 0 percent.
Chi square distribution for 10240 samples is 321.50, and randomly
would exceed this value 0.30 percent of the times.
Arithmetic mean value of data bytes is 128.5722 (127.5 = random).
Monte Carlo value for Pi is 3.195779601 (error 1.72 percent).
Serial correlation coefficient is -0.003620 (totally uncorrelated = 0.0).
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