esl-selectn(1)

📦
version 3.3.2 · 2 versions
, in fedora 43, fedora 44

✨ esl-selectn — bestie edition ✨

okay so you want a random little handful of lines out of a big ol' file and you don't wanna load the whole thing into memory?? say less, this is literally the one. it's part of the Easel miniapplication family, it's giving tiny-but-mighty 💅

🌸 NAME 🌸

esl-selectn — select random subset of lines from file

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

esl-selectn [options] nlines filename

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay bestie so esl-selectn picks nlines lines at random out of the file filename and prints them to stdout. that's it. that's the whole job. she's focused, she's efficient, she serves 🫶

and if filename is just - (a single dash, yes literally just a dash), then the input gets read from stdin instead. classic.

now here's the part where she really ATE: she uses an efficient reservoir sampling algorithm that only needs

  • a single pass through filename, and
  • memory storage proportional to nlines

and — and this is the important bit, do not skip this — NOT proportional to the size of the file filename itself. like, the file can be enormous, doesn't matter, she's unbothered 😌

so that means you can use esl-selectn to create large scale statistical sampling experiments, especially when you team her up with other Easel miniapplications. dream team fr fr ✨

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

  • -h — prints a brief help message, and yes she includes the version number plus a summary of all the options, expert options included. the whole menu, no secrets 💅
  • --seed <d> — sets the random number seed to <d>, and <d> has to be an integer >= 0. the default is 0, which means use a randomly selected seed. but if you set a seed > 0, you get reproducible identical samples from different runs of the same command. iykyk, that's the science-reproducibility slay 🔥

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

http://bioeasel.org/

Copyright (C) 2020 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Freely distributed under the BSD open source license. periodt.

💜 AUTHOR 💜

http://eddylab.org

ngl, go read the Easel docs, she's iconic and she deserves it 🎀

okay that's the whole page!! this is Easel 0.48, dated Nov 2020, mwah 💋 bye bestie, go sample something 🦋✨

📦 where this page comes from