Best way to choose a random file from a directory in a shell script
- by jhs
What is the best way to choose a random file from a directory in a shell script?
Here is my solution in Bash but I would be very interested for a more portable (non-GNU) version for use on Unix proper.
dir='some/directory'
file=`/bin/ls -1 "$dir" | sort --random-sort | head -1`
path=`readlink --canonicalize "$dir/$file"` # Converts to full path
echo "The randomly-selected file is: $path"
Anybody have any other ideas?
Edit: lhunath makes a good point about parsing ls. I guess it comes down to whether you want to be portable or not. If you have the GNU findutils and coreutils then you can do:
find "$dir" -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type f -print0 \
| sort --zero-terminated --random-sort \
| sed 's/\d000.*//g/'
Whew, that was fun! Also it matches my question better since I said "random file". Honsetly though, these days it's hard to imagine a Unix system deployed out there having GNU installed but not Perl 5.
