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From: "Charles Howse" <chowse@charter.net>
To: "'Rob Lahaye'" <lahaye@snu.ac.kr>,
	"'Gil Agno Virtucio'" <gihl@nesic.com.ph>,
	<freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 05:49:47 -0500
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Subject: RE: randomize execution the a script?
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> Gil Agno Virtucio wrote:
> > Hi. I want to randomize the execution of a shell script.=20
> Can i use cron=20
> > to do this? or are there other available tools that i can=20
> use to do this?
>=20
> See 'man 6 random' and 'man sleep'.
> Then try doing something like this in the background:
>=20
> #!/bin/sh
> while true
> do
>    random -e 60
>    randomNumber=3D$?
>    sleep $randomNumber
>    <do shell script here>
> done
>=20
> Where '60' means, maximum 60 seconds between two script calls.
>=20
> There might be better or nices ways of doing this :).

I don't happen to have random installed on my system, however jot is
installed with the base system, and will generate random numbers quite
well.  For example 'jot -r 1 1 60' will generate a single random number
between 1 and 60.

Won't randomNumber=3D$? Just return 0 if the previous command completes
successfully?
Shouldn't it be:
randomNumber=3D`random -e 60`
Or better yet randomNumber=3D`jot -r 1 1 60`