About

"Shuf" also referred to as "78 Billion Lines" is a meme about the ability of the Bash command to randomly get a large number of lines from a text file using a technique called reservoir sampling. The meme is also associated with a 78 billion line text file.

Origin

"Shuf" originates from a Stack Overflow post by user121196 asking how to select random lines from a file. The top answer, given by a user by the name of dogbane, recommended that user121196 use shuf, a command in Bash, to get the desired random lines. A user by the name of Ash then commented that the they tried it a 78 billion line text and that it did the job in less than minute.

Spread

Shuf first made waves on Reddit 8 years after the Stack Overflow post was made. u/Nexuist made a post about the aforementioned Stack Overflow Post titled The joys of StackOverflow on r/programmerhumor. It rapidly grew from there, reaching 21.9k upvotes on Reddit.