> On Nov 30, 2015, at 13:27, Pádraig Brady <[email protected]> wrote: > BTW this list has gone viral...
> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3uogjv/gnu_coreutils_gotchas/ Glossing over the reddit discussion, there's a thread about "sort -R" not being always perfect randomness, pointing to this Debian bugreport/discussion: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=641166 Perhaps that could be added as another gothca? sort -R: sorts by random order of the *hashed values* of the keys, which under certain circumstances could lead to lines being grouped together. for perfect randomness, prefer 'shuf' . Also possible (perhaps more of a 'tip' than a 'gotcha', but could help users): shuf -n NUM: starting with GNU coreutils 8.22 (released Dec-2013), 'shuf -n NUM' can shuffle any input size, regardless of the available memory. regards, - assaf
