"Martin F. Krafft" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > do you guys know of a smart way to access random lines in a file?
Hmm, here's a really quick & dirty hack: $ cat data.txt foo bar baz quux $ randline() { head -$(($RANDOM % $(wc -l < $1) + 1)) $1 | tail -1; } $ randline data.txt quux $ randline data.txt foo $ Perhaps you're interested in the following code ('shuffle'), which i got from somebody: -------------------------------- #!/usr/bin/perl sub shuffle { @arr = @_; $i = @arr -1 ; while($i >= 1) { $t = int(rand($i+1)); $h = $arr[$t]; $arr[$t] = $arr[$i]; $arr[$i] = $h; $i--; } for $line (@arr){ print $line; } } srand; shuffle <>; -------------------------------- It simply prints out the input lines shuffled. moritz -- Moritz Schulte <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.chaosdorf.de/moritz/ Debian/GNU supporter - http://www.debian.org/ http://www.gnu.org/ GPG fingerprint = 3A14 3923 15BE FD57 FC06 B501 0841 2D7B 6F98 4199