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_posts/2011-09-18-inverse-of-sort.markdown

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+---
+layout:    post
+title:     "Inverse of `sort`"
+date:      2011-09-18 14:57:31
+tags:      [linux, command-line]
+permalink: /blog/2011/9/18/inverse-of-sort
+published: true
+author:
+    name: Gergely Polonkai
+    email: gergely@polonkai.eu
+---
+
+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! :)