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Choose random file from current folder. Avoids using ls.
Good if you have your music like Artist/(Year) Album/Song
The same thing using only Bash built-in's.
For readability I've kept the variables out, but it could me made extremely more compact (and totally unreadable!) by stuffing everything inside the single echo command.
I use this command to select a random movie from my movie collection..
Prepending
env LC_CTYPE=C
fixes a problem with bad bytes in /dev/urandom on Mac OS X
Nobody wants the boss to notice when you're slacking off. This will fill your shell with random data, parts of it highlighted. Note that 'highlight' is the Perl module App::highlight, not "a universal sourcecode to formatted text converter." You'll also need Term::ANSIColor.
works at least in bash. returns integer in range 0-32767. range is not as good, but for lots of cases it's good enough.
Reads 4 bytes from the random device and formats them as unsigned integer between 0 and 2^32-1.
Sends random sounds to your sound card output (e.g. your speaker). Think... You can also run it remotely on another computer using SSH and scare its user!
Sends random beeps to your PC-speaker. Think... You can also run it remotely on another computer using SSH and scare its user! Don't forget to run it on your dedicated hosting server and watch sysadmin's action from data-center's live remote cameras!
Cycles continuously through a string printing each character with a random delay less than 1 second. First parameter is min, 2nd is max. Example: 1 3 means sleep random .1 to .3. Experiment with different values. The 3rd parameter is the string. The sleep will help with battery life/power consumption.
cycle 1 3 $(openssl rand 100 | xxd -p)
Fans of "The Shining" might get a kick out of this:
cycle 1 4 ' All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.'
Works in sort (GNU coreutils) 7.4, don't know when it was implemented but sometime the last 6 years.