Not that it matters, but while reading through the sort(1) man page, I noticed a new (to me) option:

-R, –random-sort
sort by random hash of keys

Yes, newer versions of sort will actually shuffle your input data.I’m not sure if that’s a cool thing for a command named sort to do, but I like it anyway.

A quick test (on Red Hat 6) shows that it really is random: you don’t get the same shuffle each time.

Good replacement for the Perl one-liner:

perl -MList::Util -e ‘print List::Util::shuffle <>’

(Added later: many versions of Linux include the “shuf” command.)