Gnu/coreutils/factor-invocation
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26.1 factor
: Print prime factors
factor
prints prime factors. Synopses:
factor [number]… factor option
If no number
is specified on the command line, factor
reads
numbers from standard input, delimited by newlines, tabs, or spaces.
The factor
command supports only a small number of options:
- ‘
--help
’ - Print a short help on standard output, then exit without further processing.
- ‘
--version
’ - Print the program version on standard output, then exit without further processing.
Factoring the product of the eighth and ninth Mersenne primes takes about 30 milliseconds of CPU time on a 2.2 GHz Athlon.
M8=$(echo 2^31-1|bc) M9=$(echo 2^61-1|bc) n=$(echo "$M8 * $M9" | bc) /usr/bin/time -f %U factor $n 4951760154835678088235319297: 2147483647 2305843009213693951 0.03
Similarly, factoring the eighth Fermat number 2^{256}+1 takes about 20 seconds on the same machine.
Factoring large numbers is, in general, hard. The Pollard-Brent rho
algorithm used by factor
is particularly effective for
numbers with relatively small factors. If you wish to factor large
numbers which do not have small factors (for example, numbers which
are the product of two large primes), other methods are far better.
If factor
is built without using GNU MP, only
single-precision arithmetic is available, and so large numbers
(typically 2^{128} and above) will not be supported.
The single-precision code uses an algorithm which is designed
for factoring smaller numbers.
An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value indicates failure.