> 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".
I encourage you to write such a program. (I'm not sure if option numbers 4 or 5 would be very useful, though) Other ideas: require that the permutation be a derangement, or have a minimum cycle length or order. However, none of your additional suggestions have much relevance to the type of application being discussed; nor would they seem to be able to share much of their implementation with the rest of the infrastructure of the 'sort' command. Furthermore, the fact that a feature could be extended to absurd lengths isn't a reason to hold off implementing it in a reasonable form. Frederik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Frederik Eaton http://ofb.net/~frederik/ _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
