in reply to randomly selecting files

Well, you talk about picking three files at random at once, but then you also say "until all combinations have been covered". Which means that what is really random is only the order in which you do things but that does seem mostly unimportant to me. If it actually is, then you may look up some combinatorial module on CPAN.

Said this, there are 7140 ways to pick 3 items out of 36, in which case you will have 7140 output files having a lot of redundant content each other. Is this what you really want?!?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: randomly selecting files
by anonymized user 468275 (Curate) on Jul 29, 2005 at 11:21 UTC
    Updated: Looks like this is correct, although reading the OP I interpreted it differently.

    One world, one people

[reply]
      He wrote:
      And I want to be able to write a perl script that will randomly select 3 of this files and print the contents of the remainder (i.e. the other 33 files) into one file like this
      It seems to me that he wants an output file for each of the Binomial(36,3)=7140 choices of three files out of 36. I'm not sure where you get this 33! thing from. Maybe I overlooked something.
[reply]
        Reading the OP I thought he wanted all permutations of the 33 remaining files that did not take part in the selection of three. 36 - 3 is 33

        One world, one people

[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom