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shuf: fix random line selection. Closes 9971

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"""
For example, given input file:

    foo
    bar
    baz

after shuffling the input file, foo will never end up back on the first line.
This came to light when I ran into a use-case where someone was selecting
a random line from a file using shuf | head -n 1, and the results on busybox
were showing a statistical anomaly (as in, the first line would never ever
be picked) vs the same process running on environments that had gnu coreutils
installed.

On line https://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/coreutils/shuf.c#n56 it uses
r %= i, which will result in 0 <= r < i, while the algorithm specifies
0 <= r <= i.
"""

Signed-off-by: Denys Vlasenko <vda.linux@googlemail.com>
This commit is contained in:
Denys Vlasenko 2017-07-09 00:39:15 +02:00
parent d18b200096
commit 9de9c871bf
1 changed files with 1 additions and 1 deletions
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2
coreutils/shuf.c
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@ -53,7 +53,7 @@ static void shuffle_lines(char **lines, unsigned numlines)
/* RAND_MAX can be as small as 32767 */ /* RAND_MAX can be as small as 32767 */
if (i > RAND_MAX) if (i > RAND_MAX)
r ^= rand() << 15; r ^= rand() << 15;
r %= i; r %= i + 1;
tmp = lines[i]; tmp = lines[i];
lines[i] = lines[r]; lines[i] = lines[r];
lines[r] = tmp; lines[r] = tmp;