How to make a script sleep for a random amount of seconds

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If you want to insert a sleep in a script for a random number of seconds, you can do the following:

        NUMBER=$[ ( $RANDOM % 60 )  + 1 ]
        sleep $NUMBER

Replace 60 with the interval chosen and you will get a random sleep between 1 and 60 seconds.

This can be useful if you are trying to fetch data from a server who’s monitoring the number of connections you are opening and tends to blacklist you if you do too much.