The
shuffle program prints a random permutation (or “shuffle”) of its command line arguments. This can be useful in shell scripts for selecting a random order in which to do a set of tasks, view a set of files, etc.
If the
-f option is given, the data is taken from that files' contents or if the filename is
- “stdin”.
If the
-n option is given, its argument is treated as a number, and the program prints a random permutation of the numbers greater than or equal to 0 and less than the argument.
If the
-p option is given, its argument is treated as a number, and the program prints that number of randomly selected lines or arguments in a random order.
The
-0 option changes the field separator character from \n to \0, so that the output is suitable to be sent to
xargs(1) (to handle filenames with whitespace in them).