du | sort -R OR du | sort --random-sort 1. 32K ./.gnome 960K ./Documents 919M ./.local 336K ./.java 2. 919M ./.local 32K ./.gnome 336K ./.java 960K ./Documents
This appends a random number as a first filed of all lines in SOMEFILE then sorts by the first column and finally cuts of the random numbers.
shuf is in the coreutils package
Works in sort (GNU coreutils) 7.4, don't know when it was implemented but sometime the last 6 years.
If you need to randomize the lines in a file, but have an old sort commands that doesn't support the -R option, this could be helpful. It's easy enough to remember so that you can create it as a script and use that. It ain't real fast. It ain't safe. It ain't super random. Do not use it on untrusted data. It requires bash for the $RANDOM variable to work. Show Sample Output
Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?
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