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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers How to randomly select lines from a text file Post 302720231 by gary_w on Tuesday 23rd of October 2012 04:05:11 PM
Old 10-23-2012
For the fun of it here's another way that does not use awk although the awk version will be more efficient. This has the overhead of creating the pipeline repeatedly which should be avoided for good practice. Also I believe the ksh RANDOM built-in has a limit of 32767 that must be considered if the file is large.
Code:
$ cat x
##
## x nbr_of_lines_wanted  filename
##
#!/bin/ksh

iterations=$1
file="$2"

((lines_avail=$(wc -l < "$file")+1))

while (( $iterations > 0 )); do
  head -$((${RANDOM} % $lines_avail)) "$file" | tail -1
  (( iterations=$iterations - 1 ))
done

exit 0

This is actually a good example of how a seemingly simple solution for a small file can end up burning you on performance and system limitations should you need to run it on a much larger file
or a system that may see increased load in the future.
Typically when you see a long command line or pipeline like this being done a large number of times (especially a user-enterable number of times) it should
be a red flag warning that there will most likely be a more efficient way of structuring the program.

Last edited by gary_w; 10-23-2012 at 05:11 PM..
This User Gave Thanks to gary_w For This Post:
 

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dispatch_apply(3)					   BSD Library Functions Manual 					 dispatch_apply(3)

NAME
dispatch_apply -- schedule blocks for iterative execution SYNOPSIS
#include <dispatch/dispatch.h> void dispatch_apply(size_t iterations, dispatch_queue_t queue, void (^block)(size_t)); void dispatch_apply_f(size_t iterations, dispatch_queue_t queue, void *context, void (*function)(void *, size_t)); DESCRIPTION
The dispatch_apply() function provides data-level concurrency through a "for (;;)" loop like primitive: dispatch_queue_t the_queue = dispatch_get_concurrent_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_DEFAULT); size_t iterations = 10; // 'idx' is zero indexed, just like: // for (idx = 0; idx < iterations; idx++) dispatch_apply(iterations, the_queue, ^(size_t idx) { printf("%zu ", idx); }); Like a "for (;;)" loop, the dispatch_apply() function is synchronous. If asynchronous behavior is desired, please wrap the call to dispatch_apply() with a call to dispatch_async() against another queue. Sometimes, when the block passed to dispatch_apply() is simple, the use of striding can tune performance. Calculating the optimal stride is best left to experimentation. Start with a stride of one and work upwards until the desired performance is achieved (perhaps using a power of two search): #define STRIDE 3 dispatch_apply(count / STRIDE, queue, ^(size_t idx) { size_t j = idx * STRIDE; size_t j_stop = j + STRIDE; do { printf("%zu ", j++); } while (j < j_stop); }); size_t i; for (i = count - (count % STRIDE); i < count; i++) { printf("%zu ", i); } FUNDAMENTALS
Conceptually, dispatch_apply() is a convenient wrapper around dispatch_async() and a semaphore to wait for completion. In practice, the dis- patch library optimizes this function. The dispatch_apply() function is a wrapper around dispatch_apply_f(). SEE ALSO
dispatch(3), dispatch_async(3), dispatch_queue_create(3), dispatch_semaphore_create(3) Darwin May 1, 2009 Darwin
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