Select random lines from a file

Question

In a Bash script  I want to pick out N random lines from input file and output to another file   How can this be done

User · Answer

Use shuf with the -n option as shown below  to get N random lines   shuf -n N input  gt  output

User · Answer

seq 1 100   python3 -c  print   import    quot random quot   choice   import    quot sys quot   stdin readlines

User · Answer

My preferred option is very fast  I sampled a tab-delimited data file with 13 columns  23 1M rows  2 0GB uncompressed    randomly sample select 5  of lines in file   including header row  exclude blank lines  new seed  time   awk  BEGIN   srand                   if  rand    lt    05    FNR  1  print  gt   quot data-sample txt quot    data txt    awk  tsv004  3 76s user 1 46s system 91  cpu 5 716 total

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Well According to a comment on the shuf answer he shuffed 78 000 000 000 lines in under a minute  Challenge accepted    EDIT  I beat my own record powershuf did it in 0 047 seconds   time   powershuf py -n 10 --file lines 78000000000 txt  gt   dev null    powershuf py -n 10 --file lines 78000000000 txt  gt   dev null  0 02s user 0 01s system 80  cpu 0 047 total   The reason it is so fast  well I don t read the whole file and just move the file pointer 10 times and print the line after the pointer  Gitlab Repo Old attempt First I needed a file of 78 000 000 000 lines  seq 1 78   xargs -n 1 -P 16 -I  seq 1 1000   xargs -n 1 -P 16 -I  echo  quot  quot   gt  lines 78000 txt seq 1 1000   xargs -n 1 -P 16 -I  cat lines 78000 txt  gt  lines 78000000 txt seq 1 1000   xargs -n 1 -P 16 -I  cat lines 78000000 txt  gt  lines 78000000000 txt  This gives me a a file with 78 Billion newlines  -  Now for the shuf part    time shuf -n 10 lines 78000000000 txt           shuf -n 10 lines 78000000000 txt  2171 20s user 22 17s system 99  cpu 36 35 80 total   The bottleneck was CPU and not using multiple threads  it pinned 1 core at 100  the other 15 were not used  Python is what I regularly use so that s what I ll use to make this faster     bin python3 import random f   open  quot lines 78000000000 txt quot    quot rt quot   count   0 while 1    buffer   f read 65536    if not buffer  break   count    buffer count   n    for i in range 10     f readline random randint 1  count     This got me just under a minute    time   shuf py                      shuf py  42 57s user 16 19s system 98  cpu 59 752 total  I did this on a Lenovo X1 extreme 2nd gen with the i9 and Samsung NVMe which gives me plenty read and write speed  I know it can get faster but I ll leave some room to give others a try  Line counter source  Luther Blissett

User · Answer

Function to sample N lines randomly from a file   Parameter  1  Name of the original file   Parameter  2  N lines to be sampled  rand line sampler         N t   awk   print  1    1   wc -l    Number of total lines      N t m d      N t -  2 - 1      Number oftotal lines minus desired number of lines      N d m 1      2 - 1     Number of desired lines minus 1        vector to have the 0  fail  with size of N t m d      echo  0   gt  vector 0 temp     for i in   seq 1 1  N t m d   do             echo  quot 0 quot   gt  gt  vector 0 temp     done        vector to have the 1  success  with size of desired number of lines     echo  1   gt  vector 1 temp     for i in   seq 1 1  N d m 1   do             echo  quot 1 quot   gt  gt  vector 1 temp     done      cat vector 1 temp vector 0 temp   shuf  gt  rand vector temp      paste -d quot   quot  rand vector temp  1       awk   1    0   1  quot  quot   print         sed  s         gt  sampled file txt   file with the sampled lines      rm vector 0 temp vector 1 temp rand vector temp    rand line sampler  quot parameter 1 quot   quot parameter 2 quot

User · Answer

Sort the file randomly and pick first 100 lines     sort -R input   head -n 100  gt output

[bash] Select random lines from a file

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