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RANDOM(6) Games Manual RANDOM(6) NAME random -- random lines from a file or random numbers SYNOPSIS random [-elrUuw] [-f filename] [denominator] DESCRIPTION Random has two distinct modes of operations. The default is to read lines from standard input and write them to standard output with a probability of 1.0 / denominator. (denominator is a real number greater than or equal to 1.0.) The default denominator for this mode of operation is 2.0, giving each line a 50% chance of being displayed. The second mode of operation, selected with the -f filename option, reads the specified file and outputs the randomized contents to standard output. The contents can be randomized in units of lines (split on newline charac- ters) or in units of words (split on space characters as determined by is- space(3).) The default denominator for this mode of operation is 1.0, which displays every line. The options are as follows: -e If the -e option is specified, random does not read or write any- thing, and simply exits with a random exit value of 0 to denominator - 1, inclusive. In this mode, denominator must be less than or equal to 256. -f filename The -f option is used to specify the filename to read from. Stan- dard input is used if filename is `-'. -l Randomize the input via newlines (the default). -r Do not buffer output. -U Reuse any given line or word when creating a randomized output. -u Do not select the same line or word from a file more than once (the default). This does not guarantee uniqueness if there are two of the same tokens in the input. -w Randomize words separated by isspace(3) instead of newlines. SEE ALSO fortune(6) HISTORY The functionality to randomizing lines and words was added in 2003 by Sean Chittenden <seanc@FreeBSD.org>. BUGS This tool is a remnant of the "games" collection formerly part of FreeBSD base. It probably should have been removed to ports with the rest of that collection. It does not have a coherent purpose and the motivation for it to be a core base utility is nonobvious. No index is used when printing out tokens from the list which makes it rather slow for large files (10MB+). FreeBSD ports 15.1 February 15, 2020 RANDOM(6)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | SEE ALSO | HISTORY | BUGS
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