Frederik Eaton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I think few people would care about this corner case.
Maybe, maybe not; it's a bit hard to tell without knowing why people need the option to "sort at random". Let's put it a different way. Suppose we have a program that simply generates as output a random permutation of its input lines. Would that suffice? If so, perhaps we should simply create a new "permute" program rather than folding its functionality into "sort"; that would fold better into the software tools philosophy that "sort" is part of. If not, then I would like to understand the needs better before writing or reviewing code. >> > As for the nature of the investigations, well, anything for which >> > one needs a random permutation, I suppose. Also, random sampling >> > with sort -R | head, though somewhat inefficient, but convenient, >> >> But these uses should not attempt to sort ties together. They should >> attempt to sort them separately. > > Hmm, I don't see any of these uses as involving duplicate elements. I can. One might need a random sampling of a collection of elements, some of which are identical to each other. > If they did, it would become impossible to determine exactly which > elements were sampled, or exactly what your permutation was. That's OK in many applications. (You have 30 black balls and 20 white balls in an urn, and want to select 7 balls without replacement....) _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
