Randomly shuffling lines in Linux / Bash

Question

I have some files in linux. For example 2 and i need shuffling the files in one file.

For example

$cat file1
line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4
line 5
line          


        

Answer 1

Here's a one-liner that doesn't rely on shuf or sort -R, which I didn't have on my mac:

while read line; do echo $RANDOM $line; done < my_file | sort -n | cut -f2- -d' '

This iterates over all the lines in my_file and reprints them in a randomized order.

Answer 2

You should use shuf command =)

cat file1 file2 | shuf

Or with Perl :

cat file1 file2 | perl -MList::Util=shuffle -wne 'print shuffle <>;'

Answer 3

Just a note to OS X users who use MacPorts: the shuf command is part of coreutils and is installed under name gshuf.

$ sudo port install coreutils
$ gshuf example.txt # or cat example.txt | gshuf

Answer 4

You don't need to use pipes here. Sort alone does this with the file(s) as parameters. I would just do

sort -R file1

or if you have multiple files

sort -R file1 file2

Answer 5

I would use shuf too.

another option, gnu sort has:

   -R, --random-sort
          sort by random hash of keys

you could try:

cat file1 file2|sort -R

Answer 6

Sort: (similar lines will be put together)

cat file1 file2 | sort -R

Shuf:

cat file1 file2 | shuf

Perl:

cat file1 file2 | perl -MList::Util=shuffle -e 'print shuffle<STDIN>'

BASH:

cat file1 file2 | while IFS= read -r line
do
    printf "%06d %s\n" $RANDOM "$line"
done | sort -n | cut -c8-

Awk:

cat file1 file2 | awk 'BEGIN{srand()}{printf "%06d %s\n", rand()*1000000, $0;}' | sort -n | cut -c8-