Shuf

shuf is a command-line utility included in the textutils package of GNU Core Utilities for creating a standard output consisting of random permutations of the input.

For the district in Lebanon, see Chouf District.

shuf
Operating system	Unix and Unix-like
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Command
License	coreutils: GNU GPL v3

The version of shuf bundled in GNU coreutils was written by Paul Eggert. It is not a part of POSIX.^[1]

Example

$ ls
Wikibooks  Wikipedia  Wiktionary
$ # Shuffles input 
$ ls | shuf 
Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Wikibooks
$ # Picks one random line from input
$ ls | shuf -n1
Wikipedia

See also

• sort -R
• sort --random-sort