Rolling dice in Bash

I often need short random numbers at work. For example, if I'm scheduling a whole bunch of servers to do the same automated tasks and I want them to not run at exactly the same time, I'll use a random number between 1 and 60 to have them run on different minutes. You can do this somewhat easily in bash using the $RANDOM variable and a mod operation like so:

echo $((RANDOM%60))

However, it's a bit long to type and sometimes I need batches of numbers. So I looked around at dice rolling programs but most were too fancy. So I wrote a simple simple script I called "roll" which returns sets of random numbers.

#!/bin/bash

# Roll
#   This script returns the values and sum of a set of dice rolls.  The first 
#   arg is optional and gives a number of dice.  The second arg is the number 
#   of sides on the dice.  For example "roll 2 6" will give two values from 1 
#   to 6 and also returns their sum.
#
# (c)2009 Dominic Lepiane 

sides=6
dice=1
total=0
c=0

if [ $# = 2 ] ; then
        dice=$1
        sides=$2
elif [ $# = 1 ] ; then
        sides=$1
else
        echo "Usage: $0 [# of dice] <# of sides>" >&2
        exit -1
fi

#echo "Rolling {$dice}d{$sides}"

while [ $c -lt $dice ] ; do
        c=$((c+1))
        roll=$((RANDOM%sides + 1))
        total=$((total+roll))
        echo -n "$roll "
done

if [ $dice -gt 1 ] ; then
        echo -n " = $total"
fi

echo ""

So if I want 12 numbers from 1 to 60, it looks like this:

./roll 12 60
21 32 30 38 56 36 27 19 25 34 25 48  = 391

Very handy!