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.
How about this: sleep $(perl -le 'print rand 4') That should work with more shells, and is smooth.
