Random file selector app/terminal script

[HmnCpt]

Hi,

I've done a fair bit of digging but have only found 'solutions' that haven't worked for me.

I'm after an app or terminal script that can randomly select X amount of files from within many subfolders within a main folder, and copy them to my desktop. Has anybody had a experience with successfully doing this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

2017 iMac running Ventura 13.6.1

 

[Slartibart]

there are various solutions for this using the terminal… you might have to up your google-fu 😀This is one:

#!/bin/bash # Reads a given folder and picks a random file. # The directory you want to use. You could use "$1" instead if you # wanted to parametrize it. DIR="/path/to/" # DIR="$1" # Internal Field Separator set to newline, so file names with # spaces do not break our script. IFS=' ' if [[ -d "${DIR}" ]] then # Runs ls on the given folder, and dumps the output into a matrix, # it uses the new lines character as a field delimiter, as explained above. # file_matrix=($(ls -LR "${DIR}")) file_matrix=($(ls -R $DIR | awk '; /:$/&&f{s=$0;f=0}; /:$/&&!f{sub(/:$/,"");s=$0;f=1;next}; NF&&f{ print s"/"$0 }')) num_files=${#file_matrix[*]} # This is the command you want to run on a random file. # Change "ls -l" by anything you want, it's just an example. ls -l "${file_matrix[$((RANDOM%num_files))]}" fi exit 0

here are more.