How to move a given number of random files on Unix/Linux OS

Use a combination of shuf and xargs (it's a good idea to look at their documentation with man):

shuf -n 10 -e * | xargs -i mv {} path-to-new-folder

The command above selects 10 random files of the current folder (the * part) and then move them to the new folder.

Update

Although longer, one might find this version even simpler to understand:

ls | shuf -n 10 | xargs -i mv {} path-to-new-folder

shuf just generates a random permutation of the standard input, limiting the results to 10 (like using head, but probably faster).

linux unix mv

You could use bash random generator that generates an int between 0 and 32767 to choose if a file must be put in set1 or set2. That would do:

for file in ./*; do  val=$RANDOM  if test $val -gt 3276; then    mv "$file" ../set1  else    mv "$file" ../set2  fidone

linux unix mv

Alternative version with find to avoid problems with folders.It copies 31415 randomly chosen files into /home/user/dir/

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | sort -R | head -31415 | xargs cp -t /home/user/dir/