.TH PERM 1 "August 1992" "\(co 1980 Gary Perlman" "|STAT" "UNIX User's Manual"
.SH NAME
perm \- permute line order
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B perm
[-a | -c | -e | -i | -n | -j] [-r] [-l lines] [-s seed]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.I perm
reads lines from the standard input and prints them in permuted order.
By default, this order is random,
but the order can be sorted numerically or alphabetically with options.
.SH OPTIONS
.de OP
.TP
.B -\\$1 \\$2
..
.OP a
Sort lines by alphabetic ordering.
Initial blank space is not ignored.
.OP c
Use a case-insensitive comparison and sort by alphabetic ordering.
.OP e
Sort lines by exponential (scientific) notation ordering.
Initial blank space is ignored.
This method does true numerical sorting for all numbers,
but is much slower than integer or numerical sorting.
.OP i
Sort lines by integer ordering.
Initial blank space is ignored.
.OP j
Control juxtaposition of adjacent input lines.
By default, adjacent input lines can come out next to each other.
With this option, if two input lines are next to each other,
then they will not be next to each other in the output.
For the purposes of this program, the very first and very last lines
are considered to be next to each other.
It is impossible to produce non-juxtaposed output from four lines or less.
It is unknown whether all non-juxtaposed permutations are equally probable.
.OP l lines
Set the maximum number of lines to be read.
.OP n
Sort lines by special numeric ordering.
Numbers with decimal points are allowed,
and compared by a special fast sorting algorithm
that is almost as fast as integer sorting.
.OP r
Reverse the order of comparison for sorting options.
.OP s seed
Provide an integer seed for the random number generator.
Otherwise, the seeding is done with the process number and the time,
or, on some systems, by prompting for a seed.
.SH NOTES
The program duplicates some of the
.I sort
program's functions,
but provides true numerical sorting for MSDOS whose
.I sort
only does alphabetic sorts.
.SH LIMITS
Use the -L option to determine the program limits.