I’m using *NIX systems for about 14 years now, but it can still show me new things. Today I had to generate a bunch of random names. I’ve create a small perl script which generates permutations of some usual Hungarian first and last names, occasionally prefixing it with a ‘Dr.’ title or using double first names. For some reasons I forgot to include uniqueness check in the script. When I ran it in the command line, I realized the mistake, so I appended | sort | uniq to the command line. So I had around 200 unique names, but in alphabetical order, which was awful for my final goal. Thus, I tried shell commands like rand to create a random order, and when many of my tries failed, the idea popped in my mind (not being a native English speaker): “I don’t have to create »random order«, but »shuffle the list«. So I started typing shu, pressed Tab in the Bash shell, and voilà! shuf is the winner, it does just exactly what I need:
- NAME
- shuf - generate random permutations
Thank you, Linux Core Utils! :)