Hi, I am trying to send a random files of mail in the mail folder. The mail folder has thousand of mails and I would like to randomly take files in there and send it. I have the following sendmail command, but don't know how I can send any random file from mail folder. sendmail -Ad -i -f root@localhost you@smtp.net < FILENAME

This script will choose a random file from a directory. (I'll leave the actual sendmail command to you). I use the ksh/bash RANDOM variable to generate a random number. Below, generating $s1 & $s2 to seed RANDOM might look confusing, but I do that to increase the "randomness": #!/bin/ksh # set your own directory # cd /mydir # send the directory contents to a file one per line myfile="/tmp/myfile" ls -1 > $myfile # how many files are there counter=$(wc -l < ${myfile}) # seed the RANDOM number generator s1=$(/usr/bin/ps -elfy) s2=$(/usr/bin/cat -s /etc/shadow) RANDOM=$(echo $s1 $s2|/usr/bin/cksum|/usr/bin/cut -b1-8) # generate a random number up to the total number of files number=$(($RANDOM % $counter + 1)) echo $number # print the line number from the file sed -n "${number}"p ${myfile}

Thanks for your help! Can you please explain what you are doing there with random generator. thanks

RANDOM is a shell environmental variable that each time it is accessed returns a random number between 0 and 32767: echo $RANDOM 17110 Do a man on ksh for more information. You can provide your own "seed" for RANDOM which i did with: RANDOM=$(echo $s1 $s2|/usr/bin/cksum|/usr/bin/cut -b1-8) I'm paranoid; probably you get by just fine with the default seed. Next, once I have a total count of lines in the file, dividing the RANDOM number by the total number of lines in the file and looking at the remainder (MODULO): number=$(($RANDOM % $counter + 1)) returns a number from 1 to the number of total lines - 1. Add 1 or you'll statistically never be able to look at the last line of the file.