On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 5:37 AM, Juan Christian <juan0christ...@gmail.com> wrote: > I read the cron doc, it's really simple to use, but one think I didn't see out-of-the-box is a way to set a random time, like 'execute this in a 5~10 min interval', I can only set specific times like 'execute this each minute, each hour, each 10min' and so on. > > I found a 'fix' for that using $RANDOM in the crontab. Another workaround would be to set a fixed 5min interval in cron and inside my script have a random int (0 or 1), when 0, the script doesn't execute and 1 it execute, so that way I'd have a little 'randomness' that I need. > > Which approach would be the best?
What kind of random distribution of the time between executions are you looking for? A random sleep lends itself easily to a uniform distribution. The latter approach that you describe would result in a geometric distribution.
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