NAME

shuffle — print a random permutation of the command line arguments

SYNOPSIS

shuffle

[-0] [-f filename ...] [-n number] [-p number] [arg] [...]

DESCRIPTION

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).

EXAMPLES

$ shuffle a b c d 
c 
b 
d 
a 
$ shuffle -p 1 a b c d 
d 
$ shuffle -n 4 -p 2 
0 
3

SEE ALSO

jot(1), random(6)

HISTORY

The shuffle program first appeared in NetBSD 1.4.

AUTHORS

Written by Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com>.