Shell Programming and Scripting

I'd like to put paragraph breaks \n\n randomly between 5 - 10 occurrences of the dot character (.), for an entire text file. How to do that?

In other words, anywhere between every 5 -10 sentences, a new paragraph will generate. There are no other uses of the (.) except for sentence breaks in the file.

Thanks in advance for help.

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If this is not homework please explain:

Hi, thanks, it's not homework.

1) because I like to experiment with word lists and grammar.
2) because sed has a random function, and sed examples from forums have helped me so far.
3) Linux Mint.
4) Bash shell.
5) Something like this:
sed '(RANDOM(5~10)s/$/\n/g)'< in.txt > out.txt

I'm not aware of a random function in sed; which version do you use?

And, while your code sample (ignoring the RANDOM stuff) will add a <NL> char to some EOL (end of line), in post#1 you specify that dots should be replaced. Do I guess correctly that dots are not necessarily at EOLs?

Would a non-sed solution be acceptable?

Hi, thanks for responding,

Code:

sed (GNU sed) 4.2.2

No, dots are not replaced. The idea is to put random paragraph breaks in a chunk of text, every 5 - 10 sentences, for example.

Yes I'm open to any other method.

Generally speaking: you have two problems to solve if you are using sed for this: the first is to generate a random number. Probably it will take a big lot of effort to do so (although it should in principle be possible because sed is a turing-complete language).

The second is that you are not working context-free: this is always a hassle because sed has little to offer save for a powerful regex-engine. Such problems are generally more easily solved in awk becuse this offers a programming language in addition to the regex engine.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Please show us some sample input (i.e., the contents of the file in.txt) and the output you are hoping to have produced (in the file out.txt) and the output that you did get (both diagnostic messages produced, if there were any, and the output stored in out.txt) when you ran the command:

Code:

sed '(RANDOM(5~10)s/$/\n/g)'< in.txt > out.txt

on your system.

Running that command on my system produces the diagnostic message:

Code:

sed: 1: "(RANDOM(5~10)s/$/\n/g)": invalid command code (