You can probably make your Unix systems hum — deliver great performance, withstand threats to file system integrity, resist hacker attacks, report problems, and run smoothly no matter what your users throw at them. But can you make them do goofy things? Let’s look at a collection of some really oddball tools that you might never have heard of are tried.

shuf

The shuf command — short for “shuffle” reorganizes the lines of a file in some pseudorandom way. Start out with a file listing the days of the week and you can rearrange them in any of 5,040 ways (7 * 6 * 5 * 4 * 3 * 2). Maybe more useful for determining who brings cookies into the office each day for the next couple of weeks.

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