How to Quickly Shuffle Some Names

For the daily standup, we have a random order who starts, who follows next, and so on.

How to shuffle a couple of names?

Well, obviously, you could fire up a Python repl and use the random library, e.g.

>>> from random import shuffle
>>> members = ["Me", "TeamMate1", "TeamMate2", "TeamMate3", "TeamMate4"]
>>> shuffle(members)
>>> members
['TeamMate3', 'TeamMate4', 'TeamMate1', 'TeamMate2', 'Me']

While this works, it is a lot of typing, and a lot of quotes :-)

There must be a better way

As a matter of fact, once again Bash (Coreutils) has a solution:

shuf

Never heard before? Me neither! I just learned about the command today - thanks to my teammate Colin Watson.

$ shuf -e Me TeamMate1 TeamMate2 TeamMate3 TeamMate4
TeamMate4
TeamMate2
Me
TeamMate1
TeamMate3