Inverse of `sort`
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:date: 2011-09-18T14:57:31Z
:category: blog
:tags: linux,command-line
:url: blog/2011/9/18/inverse-of-sort.html
:save_as: blog/2011/9/18/inverse-of-sort.html
:status: published
:author: Gergely Polonkai

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! :)