Pick random row from a file

Asked Jan 30 '19 at 06:35

Active Jan 30 '19 at 18:42

Viewed 63 times

How do I pick a random row of text from a file?

edited Jan 30 '19 at 17:17

Kusalananda

333,661

asked Jan 30 '19 at 06:35

Sanapa Karthik

6

Should "any row" be interpreted as "a random row" specifically, or are you just looking for the top or bottom row? This question is trivial to solve. I'm just a bit confused by the haphazard "any row". – Kusalananda Jan 30 '19 at 06:40
Just any random row – Sanapa Karthik Jan 30 '19 at 16:21
How random? head -n 1 file will give you the first row, tail -n 1 file will give you the last one. – Kusalananda Jan 30 '19 at 16:26
Not the head and tail rows it can be any row ,suppose I have 100 rows ,the output should be like only one row out of that 100 rows(that one row can be from 1-100) – Sanapa Karthik Jan 30 '19 at 17:06
The question currently asks for "any row", but you specifically want a random row. This is different from "any row". – Kusalananda Jan 30 '19 at 17:16
The question is now a duplicate of How to randomly sample a subset of a file (with 1000 changed to 1). Or possibly of Randomly draw a certain number of lines from a data file (or both). – Kusalananda Jan 30 '19 at 17:20
See also https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/326535/117549 – Jeff Schaller Jan 30 '19 at 18:13
See also: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/277242/print-specific-line-from-multiple-files – Jeff Schaller Jan 30 '19 at 18:28
n=$(wc -l <"$path"); head -$[(RANDOM<<15+RANDOM)%n] "$path"|tail -1 The distribution won't be perfectly level and it will see only the first billion lines of large textfiles. The location of the file should be in the path environment variable. – peterh Jan 30 '19 at 18:34

Pick random row from a file

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