Get A Random Line From A Text File On The Mac Command Line
April - 2022
I'm working on a little command to display a random quote every time I open a new terminal window. I setup a file with a bunch of quotes. Each one is on its own line.
To pull a random quote/line, I'm using:
sort -R quotes.txt | head -1
Details
- The
sort -R
creates a randomized set of lines from the file - Then
head -1
cuts it down to just the first line. It works great
Notes:
- Lots of notes on the web say to use
shuf -n 1
, but that's not installed by default on my machine running macOS 12.x Monterey. - The
sort
andhead
commands were available on my machine without having to install anything. That said, it's possible that something else that I installed with homebrew also installed them. Your milage may vary.