The challenge and the result
So, I was at a CLUG meeting last night, and one of the speakers had a whole bunch of bash scripts for XDM theming. Anyway, he was using a perl script to generate the random selection of the theme elements, and me and my big mouth offered that it could be done in bash itself. So here we are... Here's my post to the CLUG mailing list the next day: From mikal@stillhq.com Fri Mar 29 10:26:04 2002 Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 10:14:17 +1100 (EST) From: Michael Still To: Linux user group Subject: Nemo's bash challenge for the day Well, I said it could be done... The brief: Generate a random number, and then return that element from a list of elements, in bash The code: (Assuming that the arguements on the command line are the possible return options, and that the random number generator is running as a separate script) LOBOUND=0 HIBOUND=$# shift $(( $LOBOUND + ($HIBOUND * $RANDOM) / (32767 + 1) )) echo $1 See the attachments for some exploratory scripts I wrote while coming up with this truncated sh. There are 54 lines of comments / white spaces, to the 4 or so lines of actual…