How could a sequence of random dates be generated, given year interval?

With date, shuf and xargs:

Convert start and end date to "seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC" and use shuf to print six random values in this range. Pipe this result to xargs and convert the values to the desired date format.

Edit: If you want dates of the year 2017 to be included in the output, you have add one year -1s (2017-12-31 23:59:59) to the end date. shuf -i generates random numbers including start and end.

shuf -n6 -i$(date -d '1987-01-01' '+%s')-$(date -d '2017-01-01' '+%s')\ | xargs -I{} date -d '@{}' '+%d/%m/%Y' 

Example output:

07/12/1988 22/04/2012 24/09/2012 27/08/2000 19/01/2008 21/10/1994 

Perl:

perl -MTime::Piece -sE ' my $t1 = Time::Piece->strptime("$y1-01-01 00:00:00", "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"); my $t2 = Time::Piece->strptime("$y2-12-31 23:59:59", "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"); do { my $time = $t1 + int(rand() * ($t2 - $t1)); say $time->dmy; } for 1..6; ' -- -y1=1987 -y2=2017 

Sample output:

10-01-1989 30-04-1995 10-12-1998 02-01-2016 04-06-2006 11-04-1987 

Here's one way, mostly in awk:

#!/bin/sh [ "$end" -ge "$start" ] || exit 1 awk -v start=$1 -v end=$2 ' BEGIN { srand(); for(i=1; i <= 6; i++) printf "%02d/%02d/%d\n", 1 + rand() * 28, 1 + rand() * 12, start + rand() * (end-start); } ' < /dev/null 

The shell script takes two parameters and passes them as variables to awk, who reads no input and does all the work in the BEGIN block.

After seeding the random number generator, it loops 6 times over a printf statement. That print statement selects a subset of the possible dates in the range by generating a random number between 1 and 28 for the day (being safe for February), between 1 and 12 for the month, and between the given start and end years. It's random, but it's not full coverage -- it'll never print days 29-31 for months that have them.

Another way, using GNU date and bash features:

#!/bin/bash start=$1 end=$2 [[ "$start" -le "$end" ]] || exit 1 startsec=$(date -d "1/1/$start" +%s) for((i=1; i<=6; i++)) do r=$((RANDOM % (1 + end - start)*365*24*60*60)) date -d @$((startsec + r)) +%d/%m/%Y done 

It works by computing the seconds-since-the-epoc of Jan 1st on the start date, then for each of the loops, it comes up with a random number of offset seconds to add; the random number is limited to the number of seconds spanning the given range. GNU date then manipulates that date into the desired format.

If the difference in the number of years is less than about 90 you can use the $RANDOM variable in bash to give you an offset in number of days and use the limited ability of the date command to do the calculation.

#!/bin/bash s=$(date +%s -d "1/1/$1") # start in seconds since 1 Jan 1970 e=$(date +%s -d "1/1/$(($2+1))") # start of end year +1 in seconds days=$(((e-s)/(24*3600))) # number of days from start to end factor=$((32767/$days)) # RANDOM is 0 to 32767. See how many toobig=$(($factor*$days)) # exact multiples of days. # if RANDOM is too large, draw again for((i=0;i<${3:-1};i++)) # produce $3 random dates do r=$RANDOM # find a random number < toobig while (( r >= toobig )) # if toobig, then loop. do r=$RANDOM done offset=$(($r/$factor)) # get (0,days) from (0,factor*days) # output horrible day/month/year for N days past start date date -d "$offset days 1/1/$1" +%d/%m/%Y done 

The inner loop to select the random number attempts to correct for bias. If a random number source could give you 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 equally and you want a random number between 0 and 3 inclusive, then if you get 0 or 1 from the source you report 0, if you get 2 or 3, then you report 1, if you get 4 or 5 you report 2, if you get 6 or 7 you report 3, and if you get 8 or 9 you ignore this number from the source.