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.