Content-Type: text/shitpost

I just posted an article about a line-shuffling command I wrote no later than 2006. Adam Sjøgren immediately wrote to me to point out that there is a shuf(1) command in the GNU coreutils package, and therefore pre-installed on my very same GNU/Linux system. This by itself wouldn't be worth a followup post, but M. Sjøgren did a little software archaeology himself and discovered:

Interestingly, it was added to coreutils on August 8, 2006 …

     Author: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
     Date:   Tue Aug 8 22:22:47 2006 +0000

         New file, introduced for shuf, sort -R, and/or shred.

The very day after your file's timestamp:

     % ls -l $(which shuffle)
     -rwxr-xr-x 1 mjd mjd 91 Aug  7  2006 /home/mjd/bin/shuffle

(!)

(!) indeed!

Given the nature of these tools, it has to be coincidence, right? :-)

Paul Eggert will be hearing from my lawyer first thing Monday morning.