Select Random File from Directory

How can I select random files from a directory in bash?

Here's a script that uses GNU sort's random option:

ls |sort -R |tail -$N |while read file; do
    # Something involving $file, or you can leave
    # off the while to just get the filenames
done

select random file from directory

select random file from directory

private string getrandomfile2(string path)
    {
        string file = null;
        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(path))
        {
            var extensions = new string[] { ".png", ".jpg", ".gif" };
            try
            {
                var di = new DirectoryInfo(path);
                var rgFiles = di.GetFiles("*.*").Where( f => extensions.Contains( f.Extension.ToLower()));
                Random R = new Random();
                file = rgFiles.ElementAt(R.Next(0,rgFiles.Count())).FullName;
            }
            // probably should only catch specific exceptions
            // throwable by the above methods.
            catch {}
        }
        return file;
    }

How do I select a random file from a directory?

use the shuf command to create a random shuffle and head -1 to pick the top one

ls -1 *.png |  shuf | head -1

or

ls -1 *.png | shuf -n 1

Best way to choose a random file from a directory

import os, random
random.choice(os.listdir("C:\\")) #change dir name to whatever

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Regarding your edited question: first, I assume you know the risks of using a dircache, as well as the fact that it is deprecated since 2.6, and removed in 3.0.

Second of all, I don't see where any race condition exists here. Your dircache object is basically immutable (after directory listing is cached, it is never read again), so no harm in concurrent reads from it.

Other than that, I do not understand why you see any problem with this solution. It is fine.

Pick a random file from a directory in Java

1. Create an array of the files within the given directory using File.listFiles().
2. Select a file based on a random index from this array.
   
   That can be done with an instance of the Random class, using Random.nextInt(int bound), where bound, in this case, is the amount of files in the array, thus the array's length.

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Example:

File[] files = dir.listFiles();

Random rand = new Random();

File file = files[rand.nextInt(files.length)];

Select random file from directory

You can use glob to get all files in a directory, and then take a random element from that array. A function like this would do it for you:

function random_pic($dir = 'uploads')
{
    $files = glob($dir . '/*.*');
    $file = array_rand($files);
    return $files[$file];
}

Best way to choose a random file from a directory in a shell script

files=(/my/dir/*)
printf "%s\n" "${files[RANDOM % ${#files[@]}]}"

And don't parse ls. Read http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs

Edit: Good luck finding a non-bash solution that's reliable. Most will break for certain types of filenames, such as filenames with spaces or newlines or dashes (it's pretty much impossible in pure sh). To do it right without bash, you'd need to fully migrate to awk/perl/python/... without piping that output for further processing or such.

Pulling random files out of a folder for sampling

I was unable to get the other methods to work easily with my code, but I came up with this.

output_folder = 'C:/path/to/folder'
for x in range(int(len(files) *.1)):
    to_copy = choice(files)
    shutil.copy(os.path.join(subdir, to_copy), output_folder)            

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