POSIX requires that the awk srand() function uses the time of day to seed the PRNG. The obvious implementation used in BusyBox does exactly that, passing time(NULL) to srand(3). When processes are started within a few seconds of one another their seeds are very similar. Given the realtively poor quality of rand(3) in some C runtimes this results in random number sequences that are somewhat correlated. Improve matters by using an integer hash on the seed, as recommended here: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2019/04/30/#the-wrong-places Costs 48 bytes. (GitHub issue #279)