SHUFFLE(1) | General Commands Manual | SHUFFLE(1) |
shuffle
— print a
random permutation of the command line arguments
shuffle |
[-0 ] [-f
filename ...] [-n
number] [-p
number] [arg]
[...] |
The shuffle
program prints a random
permutation (or “shuffle”) of its command line arguments. This
can be useful in shell scripts for selecting a random order in which to do a
set of tasks, view a set of files, etc.
If the -f
option is given, the data is
taken from that files' contents or if the filename is
- “stdin”.
If the -n
option is given, its argument is
treated as a number, and the program prints a random permutation of the
numbers greater than or equal to 0 and less than the argument.
If the -p
option is given, its argument is
treated as a number, and the program prints that number of randomly selected
lines or arguments in a random order.
The -0
option changes the field separator
character from \n to \0, so that the output is suitable to be sent to
xargs(1) (to handle filenames
with whitespace in them).
$ shuffle a b c d c b d a $ shuffle -p 1 a b c d d $ shuffle -n 4 -p 2 0 3
The shuffle
program first appeared in
NetBSD 1.4.
Written by Perry E. Metzger ⟨perry@piermont.com⟩.
February 18, 2009 | NetBSD 10.99 |