.\" Man page contributed by Dirk Eddelbuettel .\" and released under the GNU General Public License .TH GSL-RANDIST 1 "" GNU .SH NAME gsl-randist - generate random samples from various distributions .SH SYNOPSYS .B gsl-randist seed n DIST param1 param2 [..] .SH DESCRIPTION .B 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, ... .SH 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 .SH SEE ALSO .BR gsl(3) , .BR gsl-histogram(1) . .SH AUTHOR .B 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 , the Debian GNU/Linux maintainer for .BR GSL .