I recently learned about the Linux command line utility shuf from browsing The Art of Command Line.
This could be useful for random sampling.
Given just a file name, shuf randomly permutes the lines of the file.
With the option -n you can specify how many lines to return.
So it’s doing sampling without replacement.
For example, shuf -n 10 foo.
txtwould select 10 lines from foo.
txt.
Actually, it would select at most 10 lines.
You can’t select 10 lines without replacement from a file with less than 10 lines.
If you ask for an impossible number of lines, the -n option is ignored.
You can also sample with replacement using the -r option.
In that case you can select more lines than are in the file since lines may be reused.
For example, you could run shuf -r -n 10 foo.
txtto select 10 lines drawn with replacement from foo.
txt, regardless of how many lines foo.
txt has.
For example, when I ran the command above on a file containing alpha beta gamma I got the output beta gamma gamma beta alpha alpha gamma gamma beta I don’t know how shuf seeds its random generator.
Maybe from the system time.
But if you run it twice you will get different results.
Probably.
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