On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 11:36:41PM -0800, Paul Eggert wrote: > 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.
I strongly agree. Such a program could do things interesting like :- 1. Permute pseudo-randomly by default. 2. Permute pseudo-randomly according to a seed specified on the command line 3. Generate the Nth permutation of its input, according to a reproducible scheme 4. Permute almost pseudo-randomly but with the proviso that the output differ from the input - and of course will fail for inputs less than two lines long. 5. Permute as directed by a stream of 'random' data (e.g. /dev/urandom or /dev/zero or a saved file - not obvious whether to loop on EOF or fail.) These are all interesting ways to permute the lines of a file, but the number of options implied by the above suggestions would be inappropriate for "sort". Regards, James. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
