[CentOS] Shell Scripting Random Delay

Wed May 15 15:44:26 UTC 2013
Matt <matt.mailinglists at gmail.com>

I have a shell script that's run every 5 minutes I use to call many
other shell scripts.  Is there a way to wait a random number of
seconds before executing each line?  Something like this.

wait_random 10 - 180 (perl /scripts/my_script.pl) &
wait_random 10 - 180 (perl /scripts/my_script5.pl) &
wait_random 10 - 180 (perl /scripts/my_script7.pl) &

I have many entries in this file and I background them all because
most must poll network devices which can take time.  None should take
over 2 minutes though.

When I run them all at once they bog the system and cause some of
latency graphs on equipment being monitored to look poor.