Question

I have a “smart” phone that doesn’t seem to have a music shuffle function, so the next best thing is to write a bash script to prepend all filenames in the current directory with a random number.

Is this difficult to do?

Answer 1

No, this is not hard to do. It will however mess up your carefully crafted filenames, and might be hard to undo.

You can use $RANDOM as a simple source of random numbers in bash. For your
case:

#!/bin/bash
for file in *; do
  mv "$file" $RANDOM-"$file"
done

I didn’t test this. You probably want to test this yourself on some small
sample to make sure you know what it does.