A POSIX shell script to assist in guaranteeing reproducible non-deterministic computation(s).

Many computational tools initialize some parts of computation based on random numbers. Typically the Pseudo Random Number Generators (RNG) used for that purpose could be pre-seeded, thus often (but not always, if e.g. computation is also parallelized and results depend on the order of the elements in the reduction step) making results reproducible. Typically such tools allow to specify the seed integer for their RNGs via some environment variable, but there is no agreement on the name of such a variable.

That is where reproseed comes to help. You can either specify your desired random seed in environment variable REPROSEED or it will generate a new random one. In either of those cases, it will then display that seed (so you could use it later to reproduce the results), and export corresponding environment variables with its value for other tools it is aware about (e.g., PyMVPA, AFNI, ANTs).

Just download reproseed.sh to your computer or install within your container, and either

• source reproseed.sh (or . reproseed.sh) in your script before running your computation

• execute your computation script via reproseed, e.g.

  ./reproseed.sh myscript -param1 arg1