Install shuf on OS X?

Question

Ubuntu Linux has a great tool called shuf, which works like head except that it gives you ten random lines. I couldn't find it on Homebrew. What is the simplest way of installing it on OS X?

It’s part of the gnu text utilities package. Seems to be part of coreutils, but I don’t know how stuff is packaged on homebrew. — jl8e, Aug 22 '14 at 16:25

score 131 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 22 '14 at 16:30

131

You can install coreutils with brew install coreutils.

shuf will be linked as gshuf. Read the caveats when you install coreutils.

answered Aug 22 '14 at 16:30

Jay Thompson

4,426

2

The caveat just seems to be that you shouldn't use the tools' proper names, but prefix them with g (like "gshuf"), right? – The Unfun Cat Aug 22 '14 at 16:35
2

Yep, or optionally configure your PATH so you get what you expect. – Jay Thompson Aug 22 '14 at 16:39
3

brew install coreutils installs the utils with the prefix g by default on osx, so you can install it using the above command. – Brad Parks Jun 17 '15 at 13:37
1

Mac OS X Catalina 10.15+, with bash enabled as the shell, does install the shuf command along with gshuf. – rjurney Jan 23 '20 at 19:20

fd0 · Answer 2 · 2015-08-07T17:45:05.417

22

Yet another solution is to learn about the tools supplied by the vendor. Certainly you could chain jot, paste, sort, cut, head and get the same results.

jot -r "$(wc -l FILE)" 1 |
paste - FILE |
sort -n |
cut -f 2- |
head -n 10

jot produces a random number from 1 to the number of lines in FILE for each line
paste pastes the random number to each line in FILE
sort sorts numeric each line
cut removes the random number from each line
head outputs the first 10 lines

edited Aug 07 '15 at 17:45

answered Jul 10 '15 at 18:55

fd0

10,708

2

I really like the essence of this answer, you never know when you might want to do the same thing on another machine where you aren't able to install extra tools for whatever reason – forquare Aug 07 '15 at 21:02
1

I had never heard about jot before. Thanks for expanding my knowledge. – tommy.carstensen Feb 07 '18 at 11:16
While this answer kind of works, by default jot doesn't generate that much randomness, in the current version it seems like it only generates integers from 1 to 100, so while this will give you a different ordering of lines, it will be far from the uniform ordering you'd get from shuf – Erik Sep 20 '20 at 14:41

mmmmmm · Answer 3 · 2020-09-13T22:53:49.530

12

You can install coreutils with Macports as

sudo port install coreutils

This will put GNU core utils in /opt/local/bin with a g prepended

e.g. gshuf

More details on the package coreutils.

edited Sep 13 '20 at 22:53

answered Jul 10 '15 at 17:55

mmmmmm

30,160

2

I used this one with macports, thanks. I don't like Homebrew much – Zorgatone Aug 07 '15 at 10:22
Great answer if you have sudo rights. I don't. – tommy.carstensen Feb 07 '18 at 12:48
@tommy.carstensen Then ask your admin - they will have made it difficult for you to do this for a reason – mmmmmm Feb 07 '18 at 14:33

score 8 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 11 '21 at 06:58

8

You can use sort -R

$ seq 5 | sort -R
2
3
4
1
5

answered Nov 11 '21 at 06:58

stationary traveller

89

3

Good answer, and works for both BSD and GNU sort. – msbit Nov 12 '21 at 03:38

score 4 · Answer 5 · edited Nov 23 '15 at 21:10

Another option is to install randomize-lines(homebrew) package, which has an rl command which has similar functionality to shuf.

Usage: rl [OPTION]... [FILE]...
Randomize the lines of a file (or stdin).

  -c, --count=N  select N lines from the file
  -r, --reselect lines may be selected multiple times
  -o, --output=FILE
                 send output to file
  -d, --delimiter=DELIM
                 specify line delimiter (one character)
  -0, --null     set line delimiter to null character
                 (useful with find -print0)
  -n, --line-number
                 print line number with output lines
  -q, --quiet, --silent
                 do not output any errors or warnings
  -h, --help     display this help and exit
  -V, --version  output version information and exit

Install shuf on OS X?

5 Answers5