Running a cron job randomly for every one hour

Question

I want a cronjob to run every one hour randomly. (i.e if the first job runs at 58 minutes,the second job should run at 47 minutes and the third one at 52 minutes and so on) But this should run randomly for everyone hour. Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

You could run a job every hour, on the hour, that sleeps up to 3,599 seconds and then executes your script:

0 * * * * /path/to/perl -e 'sleep int rand 3600' && /path/to/yourScript

Or, using PHP if you prefer that to Perl:

0 * * * * /path/to/php -r 'sleep(rand(0,3599));' && /path/to/yourScript

You can find the path to Perl with:

which perl

likewise for PHP:

which php