A script to help pick the planks for the Giles baby room

plank-picker.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash
num_planks=${1:-1} #set default number of planks to pick to 1, specify whatever number you like as argument

declare -a colors=('white' 'natural' 'blue' 'red' 'gray' 'brown')

function pick_color(){
  local color_idx=$(expr $RANDOM % ${#colors[@]})
  echo "${colors[$color_idx]}"
}

for i in `seq 1 ${num_planks}`
do
  color=$(pick_color)
  echo "${color}"
done;

# pick one plank
kermit:tmp skuenzli$ ./plank-picker.sh
blue

# pick 10 planks!
kermit:tmp skuenzli$ ./plank-picker.sh 10
white
brown
natural
white
brown
natural
natural
natural
gray
blue

note, this script will not produce perfectly-uniform results, but is probably good enough for a baby room:

kermit:tmp skuenzli$ ./plank-picker.sh 6000 | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
1041 white
1003 brown
1002 natural
 990 blue
 988 red
 976 gray