Simple method to shuffle the elements of an array in BASH shell?

The accepted answer doesn't match the headline question too well, though the details in the question are a bit ambiguous. The question asks about how to shuffle elements of an array in BASH, and kurumi's answer shows a way to manipulate the contents of a string.

kurumi nonetheless makes good use of the 'shuf' command, while siegeX shows how to work with an array.

Putting the two together yields an actual "simple method to shuffle the elements of an array in BASH shell":

$ myarray=( 'a;' 'b;' 'c;' 'd;' 'e;' 'f;' )$ myarray=( $(shuf -e "${myarray[@]}") )$ printf "%s" "${myarray[@]}"d;b;e;a;c;f;

From the BashFaq

This function shuffles the elements of an array in-place using the Knuth-Fisher-Yates shuffle algorithm.

#!/bin/bashshuffle() {   local i tmp size max rand   # $RANDOM % (i+1) is biased because of the limited range of $RANDOM   # Compensate by using a range which is a multiple of the array size.   size=${#array[*]}   max=$(( 32768 / size * size ))   for ((i=size-1; i>0; i--)); do      while (( (rand=$RANDOM) >= max )); do :; done      rand=$(( rand % (i+1) ))      tmp=${array[i]} array[i]=${array[rand]} array[rand]=$tmp   done}# Define the array named 'array'array=( 'a;' 'b;' 'c;' 'd;' 'e;' 'f;' )shuffleprintf "%s" "${array[@]}"

Output

$ ./shuff_ar > somefile.txt$ cat somefile.txtb;c;e;f;d;a;

If you just want to put them into a file (use redirection > )

$ echo "a;b;c;d;e;f;" | sed -r 's/(.[^;]*;)/ \1 /g' | tr " " "\n" | shuf | tr -d "\n"  d;a;e;f;b;c;$ echo "a;b;c;d;e;f;" | sed -r 's/(.[^;]*;)/ \1 /g' | tr " " "\n" | shuf | tr -d "\n" > output.txt

If you want to put the items in array

$ array=( $(echo "a;b;c;d;e;f;" | sed -r 's/(.[^;]*;)/ \1 /g' | tr " " "\n" | shuf | tr -d " " ) )$ echo ${array[0]}e;$ echo ${array[1]}d;$ echo ${array[2]}a;

If your data has &#abcde;

$ echo "a;&#abcde;c;d;e;f;" | sed -r 's/(.[^;]*;)/ \1 /g' | tr " " "\n" | shuf | tr -d "\n"d;c;f;&#abcde;e;a;$ echo "a;&#abcde;c;d;e;f;" | sed -r 's/(.[^;]*;)/ \1 /g' | tr " " "\n" | shuf | tr -d "\n"&#abcde;f;a;c;d;e;