#872 Manual Section 18.1 incorrectly states rndseed is 1 on startup, but is actually process ID

[Andrew Sterian]

Section 18.1 of the User's Manual (version 47, August 11th, 2026) states in Section 18.1:

"If no input is given, then ngspice sets the seed (stored in variable rndseed) to 1 upon start up."

The actual behavior seems to be that the random seed is set to the process ID.

For example, with the attached script, the result should be the same every time if the seed is the same every time. Instead we get:

for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ; do ngspice -b default_seed.cir| fgrep resistance ; done
@r1[resistance] = 9.825701e+02
@r1[resistance] = 8.915465e+02
@r1[resistance] = 1.182747e+03
@r1[resistance] = 9.995695e+02
@r1[resistance] = 8.620584e+02
@r1[resistance] = 9.839922e+02
@r1[resistance] = 1.007452e+03
@r1[resistance] = 9.485660e+02
@r1[resistance] = 1.039764e+03
@r1[resistance] = 8.351679e+02

[Holger Vogt]

Fixed by commit
059066b53 ("Fix bug 873 main.c: initialise rndseed to 1 and and get random numbers by initw(). inp.c: extract options seed=val|random in netlist and script files. wallace.c: if initw is called a second time, re-allocate memory, not just overwrite it (memory leak!).", 2026-10-05)