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From: jes@mbio.med.upenn.edu (Joe Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: How do I pick a word at random from a list of words?
Message-ID: <JES.89May19211059@mbio.med.upenn.edu>
Date: 20 May 89 01:10:59 GMT
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Organization: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
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In-reply-to: bjornand@idt.unit.no's message of 18 May 89 16:36:22 GMT

At the risk of starting a 'lets all write this in our favorite
langauge' blitz, here's an awk (sorry, 'new' awk or GNU awk) function
that print's an argument at random.  It's easily modified to read a
file of words, if you need that.
------------------------------>8 cut here 8<------------------------------
#!/bin/sh

gawk '
BEGIN {
	srand()				# set rand() seed from current time
	print rword(ARGV, ARGC)
	exit
}

function rword (a, n) {
	return a[ int(rand() * n + 1) ]	# 1 <= n <= ARGC
}' $*

--
 Joe Smith
 University of Pennsylvania                    jes@mbio.med.upenn.edu
 Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics          (215) 898-8348
 Philadelphia, PA 19104-6059