[Joerg Schuster] > I am looking for a method to "shuffle" the lines of a large file.
If speed and space are not a concern, I would be tempted to presume that this can be organised without too much difficulty. However, looking for speed handling a big file, while keeping equiprobability of all possible permutations, might be sensibly more difficult. I vaguely remember having read something along these lines (not shuffling as you mean it, but still, reorganising a lengthy file) in Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming", in one of the exercises within the chapter on Sorting methods (volume 3). That's long ago, but if I remember well, Knuth did not consider this as an easy exercise. -- François Pinard http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
