fuck this challenge, no interesting concepts, only tricky details look into zsh source, sind out that RANDOM uses C srand / rand srand is called on zsh init with epoch sec+usec seed we can guess the seed, filter using known values and do trial decryptions to find the right one tricky detail: subshell does not modify the rand state of the parent shell so in the encoded piece generation the random value does not change.. haha that did not cost me my sanity