How do i produce a random number in a bash shell script?

pangolinsos

One way is to use the RANDOM variable. This could be useful if you want to produce output to temporary files and needs a random number to make the files names different.

$ echo $RANDOM
1048
$ echo $RANDOM
22174
$ echo $RANDOM
19572
$ echo $RANDOM
26971

$ touch /tmp/command.out.$RANDOM
$ ls -ld /tmp/command.out*
-rw-r--r-- 1 parallels parallels 0 Apr  8 18:44 /tmp/command.out.25266