RE: new coreutil? shuffle - randomize file contents

[Lemley James - jlemle]

I'm just a lurker so my opinion doesn't count.  for much.

Certainly I don't expect everyone to be a programmer in order to be able
to shuffle their playlist, but perhaps an example needs to be added to
the sort man-page stating how easy is to accomplish with tools that are
likely already installed on your system (specifically, "awk" to add a
pseudorandom key to a line and "cut" to remove it): 

find /music -name '*ogg' -type f | 
awk 'BEGIN{srand()}{printf "%06d%s\n", rand()*1000000, $0}' | 
sort | 
cut -b 7- > /music/randomized_oggfiles.m3u

Remove srand() if you prefer more deterministic behavior.   Standard
disclaimers about using pseudorandom numbers for anything important
apply.

As to adding a random function to sort that would keep like-keys
together, perhaps that can be achieved by abusing the locales and
collate function that does unexpected things for many users anyway?  I'm
only half serious when I say that, but LANG=(something other than C) has
caused so many users so much grief already that LANG=random couldn't be
any worse. 

Apologies for the noise on the list, but I hope you got a chuckle from
LANG=random anyway.  I'll go back to lurking now. 


James Youngman wrote:

>I don't agree. You just end up duplicating
>99% of the sort logic. Logically the only difference from sort
>is the low level ordering algorithm. so I vote for and extra arg to 
>sort: --sort="random". Another arg to the --sort option could be,
>"version" which would sort files with version numbers in their name
>appropriately.



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