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Inverse of `sort` |
2011-09-18 14:57:31 |
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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 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! :)