Shell Scripting Random Delay

Question

I have a shell script that's run every 5 minutes I use to call many other shell scripts. Is there a way to wait a random number of seconds before executing each line? Something like this.

wait_random 10 - 180 (perl /scripts/my_script.pl) &
wait_random 10 - 180 (perl /scripts/my_script5.pl) &
wait_random 10 - 180 (perl /scripts/my_script7.pl) &

I have many entries in this file and I background them all because most must poll network devices which can take time. None should take over 2 minutes though.

When I run them all at once they bog the system and cause some of latency graphs on equipment being monitored to look poor.

Answer 1

Something like

sleep $(($(date +%S)*3))

More random would be to use nanoseconds (see date manpage), but then you'd have to cook up an algorithm to test and toss out values (arguments to 'sleep') which you didn't want.

Answer 2

Use your script to generate a random number http://islandlinux.org/howto/generate-random-numbers-bash-scripting and pass that to the sleep command?

Answer 3

There's a better answer: do some testing to find out just how many you can do at a time without the network bogging down, then

for ( $list  ) {
 my_script.pl $list
}

With the datafile being something like

#fast device responders
dev1 dev2 dev3 dev4
dev5 dev6 dev7 dev8
#slow device responders
sdev1 sdev2
sdev3 sdev4

And make your script do all of the first line, then wait for responses.

Answer 4

For bash terminal we get random value from this variable
$RANDOM

Each time if you echo $RANDOM, it will give a random value, you can take this value mode (%) with your preferred range

For example:- i would like to get the random value between 0-9
echo $((echo $RANDOM % 10))

In your case you can:-
sleep $((echo $RANDOM % 10))