Philip Rowlands wrote: > This would help with some work I'm doing today, but is it of general > interest? > > $ sleep --random 4.0 > > sleeps for a random amount of time up to and including the requested > value. The purpose is that on distributed systems it's disruptive to > have synchronized scripts all starting up together. One option is to use > the shell's $RANDOM if available, but it's lot of typing to get true (vs > coarsely quantized) randomness.
Be careful with random sleeps: http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2009/09/14/period-pain/ You're right that the existing is more verbose but it's also more general: sleep $(seq .1 .1 4 | head -n $(($RANDOM%40 +1)) | tail -n1) I'm not sure we should add this. cheers, Pádraig.
