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post Inverse of `sort` 2011-09-18T14:57:31Z
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Gergely Polonkai gergely@polonkai.eu

Im 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. Ive 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 dont 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! :)