Shell Programming and Scripting

Although /dev/random and /dev/urandom are not POSIX, they are both available on HPUX and AIX, so he might have it.

$RANDOM does not exist in true Bourne Shell. It also does not exist in "csh" which could be more relevant to you.

If your normal shell is "csh" the "!#/bin/sh" syntax is valid but it goes off and starts a new Shell and then does nothing else. It does not execute the commands in the script after that line. When the "/bin/sh" session ends, it then continues with the next lines in the script but executes them in "csh" where $RANDOM is not valid.

Code:

The solution is to call a "sh" script from the "csh" script.

#!/bin/csh
# my_main_script.sh
/bin/sh my_sub_script.sh


#my_sub_script.sh
echo "${RANDOM}"