generate possible combonations

[galger]

There is probably a unix script out there like this..

Need to generate possible combonations of a paticular list.

example:
~
sally
bill
greg
jim
~

sally bill greg jim
jim greg bill sally
and so on....

 

[olded]

Hi:

I'm reading the elements into an array and RANDOMly printing out the elements.

Here's a place to start, but there are some limitations:

1) I'm hard coding the elements. You can change it to read them in from a file.

2) The elements repeat so I leave it to you to change that if it's unacceptable.

3) I'm hard coding 4 iterations.

#!/bin/ksh

function in_range_random_number
{
# Create a pseudo-random number less than or equal
# to the $UPPER_LIMIT value which is passwd as command
# line argument $1.

echo "$(($RANDOM % $1 + 1))"

}

NUMSTR=4 # number of strings
X=0
for STR in sally bill greg jim
do
   ((X+=1)) # Increment the counter by 1
   MYSTR[$X]=$STR
done
UPPER_LIMIT=$X  # Random Number Upper Limit

#
# Produce the "for" loop list of elements that represent
# the number of strings
FOR_COUNT=$(
X=0
while ((X < NUMSTR))
do
   ((X+=1))
   echo "$X "
done
)

# Build the string using random numbers to grab array
# elements from the MYSTR array.
for i in 1 2 3 4
do
   NEWSTR=""
   for i in $FOR_COUNT
   do
      NEWSTR="${NEWSTR} ${MYSTR[$(in_range_random_number $UPPER_LIMIT)]}"
   done
   echo $NEWSTR
done

 

[galger]

OldED --> Perfect!! @@ Thank you.

 

[vgersh99]

here's a the awk code ['stolen' and ported from Permutations ] prints all possible permutations of an array of items. The array is hard-coded as '1 2 3' - but can be read in from stdin/file.

nawk -f permutations.awk < /dev/null

BEGIN {
  strN=split("1 2 3", str, " ")
  permute(str, 1, strN)
}

function printV(v, size,   i)
{
    for (i = 1; i <= size; i++) {
      printf("%4d", v[i] );
    }
    printf("\n");
}


function permute(v, start, n,    i,tmp)
{
  if (start == n) {
    printV(v, n);
  }
  else {
    for (i = start; i <= n; i++) {
      tmp = v[i];

      v[i] = v[start];
      v[start] = tmp;
      permute(v, start+1, n);
      v[start] = v[i];
      v[i] = tmp;
    }
  }
}

vlad
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