If you definitely want to create a copy of the file with its lines randomly shuffled, then the approaches that spring to my mind are:

1) make sure you have several Gbs of space free in /tmp, then 

$ perl -pe '$_ = rand(100000000). " $_"' bigfile \
    | sort -k 1n | perl -pe 's/^\d+ //' > bigfile_sorted

[download]
Sort is generally quite efficient at sorting large files. Or you're using an OS that doesn't have a sort utility capable of handling a 4Gb+ file, then

2) randomly distribute the lines into a number of smaller files, individually randomise them, then concatenate them 

perl -ne 'BEGIN { for (1..16) { open my $fh, ">tmp$_"; push @f, $fh" }
    print { $f[rand16]} $_' bigfile

(randomise the files tmp1 .. tmp16), then

$ cat tmp* > bigfile_sorted
$ rm tmp*

[download]

Dave.

In reply to Re: Randomizing Big Files by dave_the_m
in thread Randomizing Big Files by Anonymous Monk

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