You guys are *ace* at these kind of problems! Suppose I have a text file like this:

Apples
Pears
Oranges
Banannas

And I want to set a variable in a bash script with a random word from this file. Possible? Easy? Who knows ;-) !!!

a bash script using awk/gawk can choose a random "file" from a directory.........

I'm sure it can be used to select a word at random from a file........

And its a line I'm after, even though in my example I have 1 word/line.
Thanks for your interest.

cat filename | grep ´pattern´?

<edit> ...solution for a question he didn't ask in the first place ... </edit>

Not exactly a bash or a shell script, but if you can use a C file with it.. that just return a random number from 1 to a specific number you supply, and then you can get that line from the file.

Here is randline.sh, a script to return a random line from a file.

wizard@3[~]$
wizard@3[~]$ cat test.dat
Apples
Pears
Oranges
Banannas
wizard@3[~]$ cat randline.sh
#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -ne 1 ]
then
echo "Syntax: $0 FILE"
echo $0 - display a random line from FILE.
exit 1
fi
RAND=`cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid | cut -c1-4 | od -d | head -1 | cut -d' ' -f2`
LINES=`cat "$1" | wc -l`
LINE=`expr $RAND % $LINES + 1`
head -$LINE $1 | tail -1
wizard@3[~]$ ./randline.sh
Syntax: ./randline.sh FILE
./randline.sh - display a random line from FILE.
wizard@3[~]$ ./randline.sh test.dat
Pears
wizard@3[~]$ ./randline.sh test.dat
Apples
wizard@3[~]$ ./randline.sh test.dat
Oranges
wizard@3[~]$ ./randline.sh test.dat
Banannas
wizard@3[~]$ ./randline.sh test.dat
Banannas
wizard@3[~]$ ./randline.sh test.dat
Pears
wizard@3[~]$ ./randline.sh test.dat
Pears
wizard@3[~]$ ./randline.sh test.dat
Banannas
wizard@3[~]$ ./randline.sh test.dat
Apples
wizard@3[~]$

Wow! You win big style my man - thanks x 1000 :-)

You are welcome :-)

RAND can be more random and simple (no need cuts):
RAND=`od -d -N2 -An /dev/urandom`

Bash can simplify some equations (no need eval):
LINE=$(( RAND % LINES + 1 ))

This thread is now 4.5 years old---I don't think anyone's listening anymore

...except those who have a subscription .

I won't even ask why you are still subscribed to this........

You honestly think I should unsubscribe all finished threads I once participated in? Do you do that with yours? Then you have my deepest admiration and respect .

Well, I don't mean to barge in to this exchange fellows however, I just found this thread through Google, and the script by jmings works perfect, his post illustrated what he did (I can't stand it when people just slap paste some code, I mean, I am not asking for a 100 page manual for a one liner, however, it truly does not hurt to illustrate things a bit) and I have benefited from this thread, and no, this is not some joke at the expense of pixellany, this is an authentic noob working on an evil little project of his

Cheers to all, and thank you jmings!

M.ROMAN

That's even more than I bargained for. Good luck to you mroman .