Question

I want to open and close some web pages with random intervals for an hour.

So far i have written the innards

FILE=webpages
TIMES=0
while test $TIMES -lt 10
do
    #Picks random line(Website) from FILE
    TEMPWEB=`shuf -n 1 $FILE`
    echo "Opening" $TEMPWEB
    #Opens TEMPWEB
    xdg-open $TEMPWEB
    sleep 10
    #Kills firefox
    ps -e | grep firefox | sed 's/\(.[0-9]*\).*/\1/' | xargs kill
    TIMES=$(($TIMES+1))
done

So I’m am missing the while condition.
I want something like:

TIMER = 0h 0m 0s
while( TIMER < 1 h)
   ....
done

Is this possible?

PS. what’s the command to random number?

Answer 1

Surely. Try:

#!/bin/bash
START=`date +%s`
while [ $(( $(date +%s) - 3600 )) -lt $START ]; do
    ....
done

date +%s shows the current time in seconds since 1970. The loop computes the current date of an hour ago and checks if it exceeds the start time.