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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
---
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! :)