Generate random numbers in specific range

You can try shuf from GNU coreutils:

shuf -i 1-100 -n 1

In the POSIX toolchest, you can use awk:

awk -v min=5 -v max=10 'BEGIN{srand(); print int(min+rand()*(max-min+1))}'

Do not use that as a source to generate passwords or secret data for instance, as with most awk implementations, the number can easily be guessed based on the time that command was run.

With many awk implementations, that command run twice within the same second will generally give you the same output.

jot

On BSD and OSX you can use jot to return a single random (-r) number from the interval min to max, inclusive.

$ min=5
$ max=10
$ jot -r 1 $min $max

Distribution problem

Unfortunately, the range and distribution of randomly generated numbers is influenced by the fact that jot uses double precision floating point arithmetic internally and printf(3) for output format, which causes rounding and truncation issues. Therefore, the interval's min and max are generated less frequently as demonstrated:

$ jot -r 100000 5 10 | sort -n | uniq -c
9918  5
20176 6
20006 7
20083 8
19879 9
9938  10

On OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) this appears to have been fixed:

$ jot -r 100000 5 10 | sort -n | uniq -c
16692 5
16550 6
16856 7
16579 8
16714 9
16609 10  

and...

$ jot -r 1000000 1 10 | sort -n | uniq -c
100430 1
99965 2
99982 3
99796 4
100444 5
99853 6
99835 7
100397 8
99588 9
99710 10

Solving the distribution problem

For older versions of OS X, fortunately there are several workarounds. One is to use printf(3) integer conversion. The only caveat is that the interval maximum now becomes max+1. By using integer formatting, we get fair distribution across the entire interval:

$ jot -w %i -r 100000 5 11 | sort -n | uniq -c
16756 5
16571 6
16744 7
16605 8
16683 9
16641 10

The perfect solution

Finally, to get a fair roll of the dice using the workaround, we have:

$ min=5
$ max_plus1=11  # 10 + 1
$ jot -w %i -r 1 $min $max_plus1

Extra homework

See jot(1) for the gory math and formatting details and many more examples.