Often you may want to select one or more random files from a directory in Bash.
The easiest way to do so is by using the following syntax:
ls | shuf -n 4
This particular example selects 4 files randomly from the current directory.
Here is what the various commands do:
- ls: List all files in current directory
- shuf: “Shuffle” the files in the directory randomly
- -n: Specifies the number of files to return
To select a different number of files, simply change the 4 to a different number.
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: How to Select Random Files from Directory in Bash
Suppose that we would like to randomly select 4 files from our current directory.
Before we do so, we can first use the ls command to view all files in the current directory:
From the output we can see that the current directory contains the following files:
- coaches.txt
- employees.csv
- interns.csv
- owners.txt
- players.txt
- teams1.txt
- teams2.txt
Suppose that we would like to randomly select four of these files from the directory.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
ls | shuf -n 4
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this returns four random files from the directory:
- owners.txt
- interns.csv
- players.txt
- teams1.txt
Note that each time we run this code we may get a different set of four files from the directory.
Note: Feel free to change the number provided after the -n operator to instead randomly select a different number of files from the directory.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Bash:
Bash: How to Generate Random Number in Range
Bash: How to Select Random Lines from a File
Bash: How to List All Files Matching a Specific Pattern
