| Description: |
Many people know the trick from perlfaq about how to choose a line uniformly at random from a file (or pipe), without knowing a priori how many lines are coming.
Here is a generalization of the method that chooses a random subset (without repetition) of N random lines from a file. The method only needs to keep N lines of the file in memory. It also preserves the ordering of lines. If the little script is named sample, you use it like this:
$ sample 10 somelongfile.txt ## to get 10 random lines
$ some long command | sample 50 > mysample.txt
Proof of correctness is fairly straight-forward by induction.
Note: perlfaq recommends File::Random for the case of choosing 1 random line. And indeed, the random_line function in that module has an option to choose more than 1 line. However, it selects with repetition. |
my $wanted = shift || 10;
my @got;
die "Invalid number of lines!\n" if $wanted < 1;
while (<>) {
if (@got < $wanted) {
push @got, $_;
} elsif (rand($.) < $wanted) {
splice @got, rand(@got), 1;
push @got, $_;
}
}
die "Not enough lines!\n" if @got < $wanted;
print @got;
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