Re: notify via virtual terminal available packages

[Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org>]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 07:23:28AM -0600, Charles Curley wrote:
>    5      3      *                *	*	root	sleep $( echo $((1 + RANDOM \% 1200)) ) ; /usr/bin/apt-get update > /dev/null && /usr/bin/apt-get -dy dist-upgrade > /dev/null

RANDOM is a bashism, not available in sh, so that won't work in a
crontab unless you've altered which shell cron is using to parse the
crontab.

If you *do* use bash to parse the line, then the $( echo ... ) bit is
unnecessary.

sleep $((1 + RANDOM \% 1200))

But the safer way is simply to assume that the crontab is being parsed by
sh (because that's what is actually used by default), and move your
bash-specific code to a script.  Then call the script from the crontab.