On: look(1): lines beginning with given string

[cfcef]

In the same vein of 'improvements over things everyone assumes you have to do with the more famous tool', we could say grep '^string' : look :: sort -R : shuf

[nhaehnle → cfcef]

Thanks to @climagic on Twitter, I recently learned that sort -R and shuf are not in fact the same thing. (sort -R doesn't actually shuffle...)

[cfcef → nhaehnle]

My point there was that besides being a true shuffle, 'shuf' also has an algorithmic advantage when you only need a few lines (similar to how lookup has an advantage when you only need a few).

[ryan-c → cfcef]

look does a binary search and only works on sorted files, while grep '^string' works on any text file but would be slower.