Piotr Gabryjeluk

How did I dare not to know the shuf command…

Anyway, I'll keep the post just to demonstrate some nice syntax sugar of BASH :)

At first sight (without actual analysis), your bash urandom based command seems to return more randomly distributed numbers than the shuf one.

Regardless, cool article!

echo $RANDOM

• shuff -i 0-3 -n 1
• seq 4 | sort -R | head -n1
• echo $((RANDOM%4))
• echo $(($(printf '%d' "'`head -c 1 /dev/urandom | base64 | tr A D`")%4))

This gives an idea of how versatile BASH is.

You should use $RANDOM…