27 lines
1.3 KiB
ReStructuredText
27 lines
1.3 KiB
ReStructuredText
Inverse of `sort`
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#################
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:date: 2011-09-18T14:57:31Z
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:category: blog
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:tags: linux,command-line
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:url: blog/2011/9/18/inverse-of-sort.html
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:save_as: blog/2011/9/18/inverse-of-sort.html
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:status: published
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:author: Gergely Polonkai
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I’m using \*NIX systems for about 14 years now, but it can still show me new things. Today I had
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to generate a bunch of random names. I’ve create a small perl script which generates permutations
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of some usual Hungarian first and last names, occasionally prefixing it with a ‘Dr.’ title or
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using double first names. For some reasons I forgot to include uniqueness check in the script.
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When I ran it in the command line, I realized the mistake, so I appended ``| sort | uniq`` to the
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command line. So I had around 200 unique names, but in alphabetical order, which was awful for my
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final goal. Thus, I tried shell commands like ``rand`` to create a random order, and when many of
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my tries failed, the idea popped in my mind (not being a native English speaker): “I don’t have to
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create »random order«, but »shuffle the list«. So I started typing ``shu``, pressed Tab in the
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Bash shell, and voilà! ``shuf`` is the winner, it does just exactly what I need:
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**NAME**
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shuf - generate random permutations
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Thank you, Linux Core Utils! :)
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