I'd like to apologize if my question had already been asked, but english isn't my native language and I didn't find the answer. I'd like to have a bash script that executes a program I'll call MyProgram, and I want it to run with a fixed number of arguments which consist in random numbers. I'd like to have something like this:
./MyProgram for(i = 0; i < 1000; i++) $(($RANDOM%200-100))
How should I go about this?
You (mostly) just have the loop and the actual program call inverted.
for ((i=0; i < 1000; i++)); do
./MyProgram $((RANDOM%200 - 100))
done
If, however, you actually want 1000 different arguments passed to a single call, you have to build up a list first.
args=()
for ((i=0; i < 1000; i++)); do
args+=( $((RANDOM%200 - 100)) )
done
./MyProgram "${args[@]}"
The
$RANDOM % 200 - 100
is the same as the next perl
perl -E 'say int(200*rand() -100) for (1..1000)'
e.g. the
perl -E 'say int(200*rand() -100) for (1..1000)' | xargs -n1 ./MyProgram
will run like:
./MyProgram -10
./MyProgram 13
... 1000 times ...
./MyProgram 55
./MyProgram -31
if you need 1000 args
./MyProgram $(perl -E 'say int(200*rand() -100) for (1..1000)')
will produce
./MyProgram 5 -41 -81 -79 -14 ... 1000 numbers ... -63 -9 95 -9 -29
In addition to what @chepner says, you can also use the for ... in style of for loop. This looks like:
for a in one two three; do
echo "${a}"
done
which would produce the result:
one
two
three
In other words, the list of words after the in part, separated by spaces, is looped over, with each iteration of the loop having a different word in the variable a.
To call your program 1000 times (or just modify to produce the list of arguments to run it once as in @chepner's answer) you could then do:
for a in $(seq 1 1000); do
./MyProgram $((RANDOM%200 - 100))
done
where the output of the seq command is providing the list of values to loop over. Although the traditional for loop may be more immediately obvious to many programmers, I like for ... in because it can be applied in lots of situations. A crude and mostly pointless ls, for example:
for a in *; do
echo "${a}"
done
for ... in is probably the bit of "advanced" bash that I find the most useful, and make use of it very frequently.
seq rather than built-in (and thus platform-independent) C-style for-loop functionality used by chepner's answer.echo "$a" is more robust than either echo $a or echo ${a}; both the latter incorrectly files named as, say, ./foo * bar.
for i in {1..1000}; ... would be a "better" way of doing it.
./MyProgram $( for ((i = 0; i < 1000; i++)); do echo $(($RANDOM%200-100)); done ). While only 1000 arguments isn't going to stress things, you will need to be careful if the argument list grows by a couple of orders of magnitude (100000 numbers is likely too big, or close to too big, to fit in the argument list).