Davis Houlton writes:-
I recently had to write a shuffle utility for a personal project and
was wondering if it would make a canidate for the coreutils
suite. It seems like the kind of utility the toolbox could use
(maybe under section 3. Output of entire files).
This behaviour was proposed a few months ago as a new option to
"sort", and there were objections around the ideas of keeping the
shuffled sort stable (i.e. that lines with the same key should appear
in groups in the shuffled output) and of repeatability (e.g. giving a
'random seed' to ensure output is reproducible[*]). Much discussion
followed and eneded up with many people agreeing that this behaviour
properly belonged in a a separate program.
So, I think that "shuffle" is a good idea.