> I don't think this functionality belongs in dash.  For example, I
> find that the "sleep" command in
> 
>> Example of a simple cronjob which runs with a random delay of
>> 0 ~ 327 seconds (to prevent network peaks of all the machines):
>>
>>   */30 * * * * sleep $(($RANDOM/100)) && do_something_network_related
> 
> is better written (more portably and more intuitively) as
> 
>       sleep $(awk 'BEGIN {srand(); printf "%d\n", rand()*327}')
> 
> or
> 
>       awk 'BEGIN { srand(); system("sleep " int(rand() * 327)) }'
> 
> even though this is a little longer.

nice idea...
  */30 * * * * perl -e "sleep rand(327)"; do_something_network_related
for the ones that like perl :-)

I think that is "dash" is supposed to replace bash, it should implement
$RANDOM... but this is only my personal opinion :-)

> On the other hand, I would definitely like a way for users to be able
> to easily choose a different shell to be used by cron, so they would
> be less at the mercy of the cruel sysadmin.  What do you think?

If you put:
SHELL=/bin/something
at the begining of your crontab, all the lines will be run with your
prefered shell.

Thanks,
Pedro



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