Shell Programming and Scripting

Calling into question people's intent usually puts them on the defensive. Had you just said "I don't know" I would have had zero problems.

Next time think before you hit submit.

You seem to be taking this rather personally. Have you been struggling with this issue for a while? Do you think you might benefit from a break for a chance to look at it from a fresh perspective?

What I would benefit from is people helping me solve this problem instead of calling to question my intent, then wondering why I'm being defensive. If you can't understand that, then I have neither the patienct nor the energy to explain it to you.

Either you wish to help me or you don't. If you wish to help, great! Otherwise, move on.

Unfortunately, that didn't generate a file large enough, but it does give me some other ideas.

Thanks Perderabo.

Here is the idea i have ....

1)create a junk file having varying lines of lengths of data ....

2)put a while loop for number of files u want ...
if u want 100 files repeat the loop 100 time

get the random number using the following

3)x=`expr $RANDOM % 1000`


4) Using this random number 'x' get the xth line from junk file
put it in the randomfile using date upto seconds
since time changes for evry sec ... u will have 60 diff files in a minute.


d=`date +%T`
5) echo "xth line" > $d.dat

6).use sleep if u want ....

Hope this is not junk idea !!

He is using csh so no RANDOM variable is maintained by the shell.

Firstly, I don't use csh (I use bourne variants), so your milage may well vary. Also; I don't know whether the lack of /dev/(u)random will effect the ability of awk to generate random numbers?

awk -vu=$upper 'BEGIN {
srand();
printf( "%0.0f\n", rand() * u );
}'

There are lots of other ideas in a script over at shelldorado although all but one seem to depend on either some kind of device file (random or urandom), or a RANDOM shell builtin.

Some kind of date manipulation may be your only option.

Cheers
ZB