GSL-RANDIST(1) General Commands Manual GSL-RANDIST(1)

# [NAME](#NAME)

gsl-randist - generate random samples from various distributions

# [SYNOPSYS](#SYNOPSYS)

**gsl-randist seed n DIST param1 param2 \[..]**

# [DESCRIPTION](#DESCRIPTION)

**gsl-randist** is a demonstration program for the GNU Scientific Library. It generates n random samples from the distribution DIST using the distribution parameters param1, param2, ...

# [EXAMPLE](#EXAMPLE)

Here is an example. We generate 10000 random samples from a Cauchy distribution with a width of 30 and histogram them over the range -100 to 100, using 200 bins.

gsl-randist 0 10000 cauchy 30 | gsl-histogram -100 100 200 > histogram.dat

A plot of the resulting histogram will show the familiar shape of the Cauchy distribution with fluctuations caused by the finite sample size.

awk '{print $1, $3 ; print $2, $3}' histogram.dat | graph -T X

# [SEE ALSO](#SEE_ALSO)

[**gsl(3)**](/man/os/gsl/gsl.3), [**gsl-histogram(1)**](/man/os/gsl/gsl-histogram.1).

# [AUTHOR](#AUTHOR)

**gsl-randist** was written by James Theiler and Brian Gough. Copyright 1996-2000; for copying conditions see the GNU General Public Licence.

This manual page was added by the Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>, the Debian GNU/Linux maintainer for **GSL**.

GNU

---

Document: gsl-randist(1) from gsl 2.8-r13 (Chainguard OS)
Source: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/gsl.git