Hi all: Now I have a 3G bytes tomcat access log named urls, each line is a url. I want to count each url and sort these urls order by the number of each url. I did it this way:
awk '{print $0}' urls | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr >> output
But it took really long time to finish this job, it's already took 30 minutes and its still working.
log file is like bellow:
/open_api/borrow_business/get_apply_by_user
/open_api/borrow_business/get_apply_by_user
/open_api/borrow_business/get_apply_by_user
/open_api/borrow_business/get_apply_by_user
/loan/recent_apply_info?passportId=Y20151206000011745
/loan/recent_apply_info?passportId=Y20160331000000423
/open_api/borrow_business/get_apply_by_user
...
Is there any other way that I could process and sort a 3G bytes file? Thanks in advance!
I'm not sure why you're using awk at the moment - it's not doing anything useful.
I would suggest using something like this:
awk '{ ++urls[$0] } END { for (i in urls) print urls[i], i }' urls | sort -nr
This builds up a count of each URL and then sorts the output.
I generated a sample file of 3,200,000 lines, amounting to 3GB, using Perl like this:
perl -e 'for($i=0;$i<3200000;$i++){printf "%d, %s\n",int rand 1000, "0"x1000}' > BigBoy
I then tried sorting it in one step, followed by splitting it into 2 halves and sorting the halves separately and merging the results, then splitting into 4 parts and sorting separately and merging, then splitting into 8 parts and sorting separately and merging.
This resulted, on my machine at least, in a very significant speedup.
Here is the script. The filename is hard-coded as BigBoy, but could easily be changed and the number of parts to split the file into must be supplied as a parameter.
#!/bin/bash -xv
################################################################################
# Sort large file by parts and merge result
#
# Generate sample large (3GB with 3,200,000 lines) file with:
# perl -e 'for($i=0;$i<3200000;$i++){printf "%d, %s\n",int rand 1000, "0"x1000}' > BigBoy
################################################################################
file=BigBoy
N=${1:-1}
echo $N
if [ $N -eq 1 ]; then
# Straightforward sort
sort -n "$file" > sorted.$N
else
rm sortedparts-* parts-* 2> /dev/null
tlines=$(wc -l < "$file")
echo $tlines
((plines=tlines/N))
echo $plines
split -l $plines "$file" parts-
for f in parts-*; do
sort -n "$f" > "sortedparts-$f" &
done
wait
sort -n -m sortedparts-* > sorted.$N
fi
Needless to say, the resulting sorted files are identical :-)
Related
I am stuck on that. So I have this while-read loop within my code that is taking so long and I would like to run it in many processors. But, I'd like to split the input file and run 14 loops (because I have 14 threads), one for each splited file, in parallel. Thing is that I don't know how to tell the while loop which file to get and work with.
For example, in a regular while-read loop I would code:
while read line
do
<some code>
done < input file or variable...
But in this case I would like to split the above input file in 14 files and run 14 while loops in parallel, one for each splited file.
I tried :
split -n 14 input_file
find . -name "xa*" | \
parallel -j 14 | \
while read line
do
<lot of stuff>
done
also tried
split -n 14 input_file
function loop {
while read line
do
<lot of stuff>
done
}
export -f loop
parallel -j 14 ::: loop
But neither I was able to tell which file would be the input to the loop so parallel would understand "take each of those xa* files and place into individual loops in parallel"
An example of the input file (a list of strings)
AEYS01000010.10484.12283
CVJT01000011.50.2173
KF625180.1.1799
KT949922.1.1791
LOBZ01000025.54942.57580
EDIT
This is the code.
The output is a table (741100 lines) with some statistics regarding DNA sequences alignments already made.
The loop takes an input_file (no broken lines, varies from 500 to ~45000 lines, 800Kb) with DNA sequence acessions, reads it line-by-line and look for each correspondent full taxonomy for those acessions in a databank (~45000 lines). Then, it does a few sums/divisions. Output is a .tsv and looks like this (an example for sequence "KF625180.1.1799"):
Rate of taxonomies for this sequence in %: KF625180.1.1799 D_6__Bacillus_atrophaeus
Taxonomy %aligned number_ocurrences_in_the_alignment num_ocurrences_in_databank %alingment/databank
D_6__Bacillus_atrophaeus 50% 1 20 5%
D_6__Bacillus_amyloliquefaciens 50% 1 154 0.649351%
$ head input file
AEYS01000010.10484.12283
CVJT01000011.50.217
KF625180.1.1799
KT949922.1.1791
LOBZ01000025.54942.57580
Two additional files are also used inside the loop. They are not the loop input.
1) a file called alnout_file that only serves for finding how many hits (or alignments) a given sequence had against the databank. It was also previously made outside this loop. It can vary in the number of lines from hundreads to thousands. Only columns 1 and 2 matters here. Column1 is the name of the sequence and col2 is the name of all sequences it matched in the databnk. It looks like that:
$ head alnout_file
KF625180.1.1799 KF625180.1.1799 100.0 431 0 0 1 431 1 431 -1 0
KF625180.1.1799 KP143082.1.1457 99.3 431 1 2 1 431 1 429 -1 0
KP143082.1.1457 KF625180.1.1799 99.3 431 1 2 1 429 1 431 -1 0
2) a databank .tsv file containing ~45000 taxonomies correspondent to the DNA sequences. Each taxonomy is in one line:
$ head taxonomy.file.tsv
KP143082.1.1457 D_0__Bacteria;D_1__Firmicutes;D_2__Bacilli;D_3__Bacillales;D_4__Bacillaceae;D_5__Bacillus;D_6__Bacillus_amyloliquefaciens
KF625180.1.1799 D_0__Bacteria;D_1__Firmicutes;D_2__Bacilli;D_3__Bacillales;D_4__Bacillaceae;D_5__Bacillus;D_6__Bacillus_atrophaeus
So, given sequence KF625180.1.1799. I previously aligned it against a databank containing ~45000 other DNA sequences and got an output whis has all the accessions to sequences that it matched. What the loop does is that it finds the taxonomies for all those sequences and calculates the "statistics" I mentionded previously. Code does it for all the DNA-sequences-accesions I have.
TAXONOMY=path/taxonomy.file.tsv
while read line
do
#find hits
hits=$(grep $line alnout_file | cut -f 2)
completename=$(grep $line $TAXONOMY | sed 's/D_0.*D_4/D_4/g')
printf "\nRate of taxonomies for this sequence in %%:\t$completename\n"
printf "Taxonomy\t%aligned\tnumber_ocurrences_in_the_alignment\tnum_ocurrences_in_databank\t%alingment/databank\n"
#find hits and calculate the frequence (%) of the taxonomy in the alignment output
# ex.: Bacillus_subtilis 33
freqHits=$(grep "${hits[#]}" $TAXONOMY | \
cut -f 2 | \
awk '{a[$0]++} END {for (i in a) {print i, "\t", a[i]/NR*100, "\t", a[i]}}' | \
sed -e 's/D_0.*D_5/D_5/g' -e 's#\s\t\s#\t#g' | \
sort -k2 -hr)
# print frequence of each taxonomy in the databank
freqBank=$(while read line; do grep -c "$line" $TAXONOMY; done < <(echo "$freqHits" | cut -f 1))
#print cols with taxonomy and calculations
paste <(printf %s "$freqHits") <(printf %s "$freqBank") | awk '{print $1,"\t",$2"%","\t",$3,"\t",$4,"\t",$3/$4*100"%"}'
done < input_file
It is a lot of greps and parsing so it takes about ~12h running in one processor for doing it to all the 45000 DNA sequence accessions. The, I would like to split input_file and do it in all the processors I have (14) because it would the time spend in that.
Thank you all for being so patient with me =)
You are looking for --pipe. In this case you can even use the optimized --pipepart (version >20160621):
export TAXONOMY=path/taxonomy.file.tsv
doit() {
while read line
do
#find hits
hits=$(grep $line alnout_file | cut -f 2)
completename=$(grep $line $TAXONOMY | sed 's/D_0.*D_4/D_4/g')
printf "\nRate of taxonomies for this sequence in %%:\t$completename\n"
printf "Taxonomy\t%aligned\tnumber_ocurrences_in_the_alignment\tnum_ocurrences_in_databank\t%alingment/databank\n"
#find hits and calculate the frequence (%) of the taxonomy in the alignment output
# ex.: Bacillus_subtilis 33
freqHits=$(grep "${hits[#]}" $TAXONOMY | \
cut -f 2 | \
awk '{a[$0]++} END {for (i in a) {print i, "\t", a[i]/NR*100, "\t", a[i]}}' | \
sed -e 's/D_0.*D_5/D_5/g' -e 's#\s\t\s#\t#g' | \
sort -k2 -hr)
# print frequence of each taxonomy in the databank
freqBank=$(while read line; do grep -c "$line" $TAXONOMY; done < <(echo "$freqHits" | cut -f 1))
#print cols with taxonomy and calculations
paste <(printf %s "$freqHits") <(printf %s "$freqBank") | awk '{print $1,"\t",$2"%","\t",$3,"\t",$4,"\t",$3/$4*100"%"}'
done
}
export -f doit
parallel -a input_file --pipepart doit
This will chop input_file into 10*ncpu blocks (where ncpu is the number of CPU threads), pass each block to doit, run ncpu jobs in parallel.
That said I think your real problem is spawning too many programs: If you rewrite doit in Perl or Python I will expect you will see a major speedup.
As an alternative I threw together a quick test.
#! /bin/env bash
mkfifo PIPELINE # create a single queue
cat "$1" > PIPELINE & # supply it with records
{ declare -i cnt=0 max=14
while (( ++cnt <= max )) # spawn loop creates worker jobs
do printf -v fn "%02d" $cnt
while read -r line # each work loop reads common stdin...
do echo "$fn:[$line]"
sleep 1
done >$fn.log 2>&1 & # these run in background in parallel
done # this one exits
} < PIPELINE # *all* read from the same queue
wait
cat [0-9][0-9].log
Doesn't need split, but does need a mkfifo.
Obviously, change the code inside the internal loop.
This answers what you asked, namely how to process in parallel the 14 files you get from running split. However, I don't think it is the best way of doing whatever it is that you are trying to do - but we would need some answers from you for that.
So, let's make a million line file and split it into 14 parts:
seq 1000000 > 1M
split -n 14 1M part-
That gives me 14 files called part-aa through part-an. Now your question is how to process those 14 parts in parallel - (read the last line first):
#!/bin/bash
# This function will be called for each of the 14 files
DoOne(){
# Pick up parameters
job=$1
file=$2
# Count lines in specified file
lines=$(wc -l < "$file")
echo "Job No: $job, file: $file, lines: $lines"
}
# Make the function above known to processes spawned by GNU Parallel
export -f DoOne
# Run 14 parallel instances of "DoOne" passing job number and filename to each
parallel -k -j 14 DoOne {#} {} ::: part-??
Sample Output
Job No: 1, file: part-aa, lines: 83861
Job No: 2, file: part-ab, lines: 72600
Job No: 3, file: part-ac, lines: 70295
Job No: 4, file: part-ad, lines: 70295
Job No: 5, file: part-ae, lines: 70294
Job No: 6, file: part-af, lines: 70295
Job No: 7, file: part-ag, lines: 70295
Job No: 8, file: part-ah, lines: 70294
Job No: 9, file: part-ai, lines: 70295
Job No: 10, file: part-aj, lines: 70295
Job No: 11, file: part-ak, lines: 70295
Job No: 12, file: part-al, lines: 70294
Job No: 13, file: part-am, lines: 70295
Job No: 14, file: part-an, lines: 70297
You would omit the -k argument to GNU Parallel normally - I only added it so the output comes in order.
I think that using a bunch of grep and awk commands is the wrong approach here - you would be miles better off using Perl, or awk. As you have not provided any sample files I generated some using this code:
#!/bin/bash
for a in {A..Z} {0..9} ; do
for b in {A..Z} {0..9} ; do
for c in {A..Z} {0..9} ; do
echo "${a}${b}${c}"
done
done
done > a
# Now make file "b" which has the same stuff but shuffled into a different order
gshuf < a > b
Note that there are 26 letters in the alphabet, so if I add the digits 0..9 to the letters of the alphabet, I get 36 alphanumeric digits and if I nest 3 loops of that I get 36^3 or 46,656 lines which matches your file sizes roughly. File a now looks like this:
AAA
AAB
AAC
AAD
AAE
AAF
File b looks like this:
UKM
L50
AOC
79U
K6S
6PO
12I
XEV
WJN
Now I want to loop through a finding the corresponding line in b. First, I use your approach:
time while read thing ; do grep $thing b > /dev/null ; done < a
That takes 9 mins 35 seconds.
If I now exit grep on the first match, on average I will find it in the middle, which means the time will be halved since I won't continue to needlessly read b after I find what I want.
time while read thing ; do grep -m1 $thing b > /dev/null ; done < a
That improves the time down to 4 mins 30 seconds.
If I now use awk to read the contents of b into an associative array (a.k.a. hash) and then read the elements of a and find them in b like this:
time awk 'FNR==NR{a[$1]=$1; next} {print a[$1]}' b a > /dev/null
That now runs in 0.07 seconds. Hopefully you get the idea of what I am driving at. I expect Perl would do this in the same time and also provide more expressive facilities for the maths in the middle of your loop too.
I hope this small script helps you out:
function process {
while read line; do
echo "$line"
done < $1
}
function loop {
file=$1
chunks=$2
dir=`mktemp -d`
cd $dir
split -n l/$chunks $file
for i in *; do
process "$i" &
done
rm -rf $dir
}
loop /tmp/foo 14
It runs the process loop on the specified file with the specified number of chunks (without splitting lines) in parallel (using & to put each invocation in the background). I hope it gets you started.
This can do the job for You, I am not familiar with parallel instead using native bash spawning processes &:
function loop () {
while IFS= read -r -d $'\n'
do
# YOUR BIG STUFF
done < "${1}"
}
arr_files=(./xa*)
for i in "${arr_files[#]}"
do loop "${i}" &
done
wait
I have a text file (bigfile.txt) with thousands of rows. I want to make a smaller text file with 1 % of the rows which are randomly chosen. I tried the following
output=$(wc -l bigfile.txt)
ds1=$(0.01*output)
sort -r bigfile.txt|shuf|head -n ds1
It give the following error:
head: invalid number of lines: ‘ds1’
I don't know what is wrong.
Even after you fix your issues with your bash script, it cannot do floating point arithmetic. You need external tools like Awk which I would use as
randomCount=$(awk 'END{print int((NR==0)?0:(NR/100))}' bigfile.txt)
(( randomCount )) && sort -r file | shuf | head -n "$randomCount"
E.g. Writing a file with with 221 lines using the below loop and trying to get random lines,
tmpfile=$(mktemp /tmp/abc-script.XXXXXX)
for i in {1..221}; do echo $i; done >> "$tmpfile"
randomCount=$(awk 'END{print int((NR==0)?0:(NR/100))}' "$tmpfile")
If I print the count, it would return me a integer number 2 and using that on the next command,
sort -r "$tmpfile" | shuf | head -n "$randomCount"
86
126
Roll a die (with rand()) for each line of the file and get a number between 0 and 1. Print the line if the die shows less than 0.01:
awk 'rand()<0.01' bigFile
Quick test - generate 100,000,000 lines and count how many get through:
seq 1 100000000 | awk 'rand()<0.01' | wc -l
999308
Pretty close to 1%.
If you want the order random as well as the selection, you can pass this through shuf afterwards:
seq 1 100000000 | awk 'rand()<0.01' | shuf
On the subject of efficiency which came up in the comments, this solution takes 24s on my iMac with 100,000,000 lines:
time { seq 1 100000000 | awk 'rand()<0.01' > /dev/null; }
real 0m23.738s
user 0m31.787s
sys 0m0.490s
The only other solution that works here, heavily based on OP's original code, takes 13 minutes 19s.
I have a set of CVS files spanning over 70GB, with 35GB being about the field i'm interested in (with around 100 Bytes for this field in each row)
The data are highly duplicated (a sampling show that the top 1000 cover 50%+ of the rows) and I'm interested in getting the total uniq count
With a not so large data set I would do
cat my.csv | cut -f 5 | sort | uniq -c | sort --numeric and it works fine
However the problem I have is that (to my understanding) because of the intermediate sort , this command will need to hold in RAM (and then on disk because it does not fit my 16Go of RAM) the whole set of data, to after stream it to uniq -c
I would like to know if there's a command /script awk/python to do the sort | uniq -c in one step so that the RAM consumption should be far lower ?
You can try this:
perl -F, -MDigest::MD5=md5 -lanE 'say unless $seen{ md5($F[4]) }++' < file.csv >unique_field5.txt
it will holds in the memory 16byte long md5-digest for every unique field-5 (e.g. $F[4]). Or you can use
cut -d, -f5 csv | perl -MDigest::MD5=md5 -lnE 'say unless $seen{md5($_)}++'
for the same result.
Of course, the md5 isn't cryptographically safe these days, but probably will be enough for sorting... Of course, it is possible to use sha1 or sha256, just use the -MDigest::SHA=sha255. Of course, the sha-digests are longer - e.g. needs more memory.
It is similar as the awk linked in the comments, with a difference, here is used as hash-key not the whole input line, but just the 16byte long MD5 digest.
EDIT
Because me wondering about the performance, created this test case:
# this perl create 400,000,000 records
# each 100 bytes + attached random number,
# total size of data 40GB.
# each invocation generates same data (srand(1))
# because the random number is between 0 - 50_000_000
# here is approx. 25% unique records.
gendata() {
perl -E '
BEGIN{ srand(1) }
say "x"x100, int(rand()*50_000_000) for 1..400_000_000
'
}
# the unique sorting - by digest
# also using Devel::Size perl module to get the final size of the data hold in the memory
# using md5
domd5() {
perl -MDigest::MD5=md5 -MDevel::Size=total_size -lnE '
say unless $seen{md5($_)}++;
END {
warn"total: " . total_size(\%seen);
}'
}
#using sha256
dosha256() {
perl -MDigest::SHA=sha256 -MDevel::Size=total_size -lnE '
say unless $seen{sha256($_)}++;
END {
warn"total: " . total_size(\%seen);
}'
}
#MAIN
time gendata | domd5 | wc -l
time gendata | dosha256 | wc -l
results:
total: 5435239618 at -e line 4, <> line 400000000.
49983353
real 10m12,689s
user 12m43,714s
sys 0m29,069s
total: 6234973266 at -e line 4, <> line 400000000.
49983353
real 15m51,884s
user 18m23,900s
sys 0m29,485s
e.g.:
for the md5
memory usage: 5,435,239,618 bytes - e.g. appox 5.4 GB
unique records: 49,983,353
time to run: 10 min
for the sha256
memory usage: 6,234,973,266 bytes - e.g. appox 6.2 GB
unique records: 49,983,353
time to run: 16 min
In contrast, doing the plain-text unique search using the "usual" approach:
doplain() {
perl -MDevel::Size=total_size -lnE '
say unless $seen{$_}++;
END {
warn"total: " . total_size(\%seen);
}'
}
e.g running:
time gendata | doplain | wc -l
result:
memory usage is much bigger: 10,022,600,682 - my notebook with 16GB RAM starts heavy swapping (as having SSD, so a not big deal - but still..)
unique records: 49,983,353
time to run: 8:30 min
Result?
just use the
cut -d, -f5 csv | perl -MDigest::MD5=md5 -lnE 'say unless $seen{md5($_)}++'
and you should get the unique lines enough fast.
You can try this:
split --filter='sort | uniq -c | sed "s/^\s*//" > $FILE' -b 15G -d "dataset" "dataset-"
At this point you should have around 5 dataset-<i> each of which should be much less that 15G.
To merge the file you can save the following bash script as merge.bash:
#! /bin/bash
#
read prev_line
prev_count=${prev_line%% *}
while read line; do
count="${line%% *}"
line="${line#* }" # This line does not handle blank lines correctly
if [ "$line" != "$prev_line" ]; then
echo "$prev_count $prev_line"
prev_count=$count
prev_line=$line
else
prev_count=$((prev_count + count))
fi
done
echo "$prev_count $prev_line"
And run the command:
sort -m -k 2 dataset-* | bash merge.sh > final_dataset.
Note: blank line are not handled correctly, if it suits your needs you can remove them from your dataset or correct merge.bash.
I have a file with a bunch of paths that look like so:
7 /usr/file1564
7 /usr/file2212
6 /usr/file3542
I am trying to use sort to pull out and print the path(s) with the most occurrences. Here it what I have so far:
cat temp| sort | uniq -c | sort -rk1 > temp
I am unsure how to only print the highest occurrences. I also want my output to be printed like this:
7 1564
7 2212
7 being the total number of occurrences and the other numbers being the file numbers at the end of the name. I am rather new to bash scripting so any help would be greatly appreciated!
To emit only the first line of output (with the highest number, since you're doing a reverse numeric sort immediately prior), pipe through head -n1.
To remove all content which is not either a number or whitespace, pipe through tr -cd '0-9[:space:]'.
To filter for only the values with the highest number, allowing there to be more than one:
{
read firstnum name && printf '%s\t%s\n' "$firstnum" "$name"
while read -r num name; do
[[ $num = $firstnum ]] || break
printf '%s\t%s\n' "$num" "$name"
done
} < temp
If you want to avoid sort and you are allowed to use awk, then you can do this:
awk '{
if($1>maxcnt) {s=$1" "substr($2,10,4); maxcnt=$1} else
if($1==maxcnt) {s=s "\n"$1" "substr($2,10,4)}} END{print s}' \
temp
What's an easy way to read random line from a file in a shell script?
You can use shuf:
shuf -n 1 $FILE
There is also a utility called rl. In Debian it's in the randomize-lines package that does exactly what you want, though not available in all distros. On its home page it actually recommends the use of shuf instead (which didn't exist when it was created, I believe). shuf is part of the GNU coreutils, rl is not.
rl -c 1 $FILE
Another alternative:
head -$((${RANDOM} % `wc -l < file` + 1)) file | tail -1
sort --random-sort $FILE | head -n 1
(I like the shuf approach above even better though - I didn't even know that existed and I would have never found that tool on my own)
This is simple.
cat file.txt | shuf -n 1
Granted this is just a tad slower than the "shuf -n 1 file.txt" on its own.
perlfaq5: How do I select a random line from a file? Here's a reservoir-sampling algorithm from the Camel Book:
perl -e 'srand; rand($.) < 1 && ($line = $_) while <>; print $line;' file
This has a significant advantage in space over reading the whole file in. You can find a proof of this method in The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, Section 3.4.2, by Donald E. Knuth.
using a bash script:
#!/bin/bash
# replace with file to read
FILE=tmp.txt
# count number of lines
NUM=$(wc - l < ${FILE})
# generate random number in range 0-NUM
let X=${RANDOM} % ${NUM} + 1
# extract X-th line
sed -n ${X}p ${FILE}
Single bash line:
sed -n $((1+$RANDOM%`wc -l test.txt | cut -f 1 -d ' '`))p test.txt
Slight problem: duplicate filename.
Here's a simple Python script that will do the job:
import random, sys
lines = open(sys.argv[1]).readlines()
print(lines[random.randrange(len(lines))])
Usage:
python randline.py file_to_get_random_line_from
Another way using 'awk'
awk NR==$((${RANDOM} % `wc -l < file.name` + 1)) file.name
A solution that also works on MacOSX, and should also works on Linux(?):
N=5
awk 'NR==FNR {lineN[$1]; next}(FNR in lineN)' <(jot -r $N 1 $(wc -l < $file)) $file
Where:
N is the number of random lines you want
NR==FNR {lineN[$1]; next}(FNR in lineN) file1 file2
--> save line numbers written in file1 and then print corresponding line in file2
jot -r $N 1 $(wc -l < $file) --> draw N numbers randomly (-r) in range (1, number_of_line_in_file) with jot. The process substitution <() will make it look like a file for the interpreter, so file1 in previous example.
#!/bin/bash
IFS=$'\n' wordsArray=($(<$1))
numWords=${#wordsArray[#]}
sizeOfNumWords=${#numWords}
while [ True ]
do
for ((i=0; i<$sizeOfNumWords; i++))
do
let ranNumArray[$i]=$(( ( $RANDOM % 10 ) + 1 ))-1
ranNumStr="$ranNumStr${ranNumArray[$i]}"
done
if [ $ranNumStr -le $numWords ]
then
break
fi
ranNumStr=""
done
noLeadZeroStr=$((10#$ranNumStr))
echo ${wordsArray[$noLeadZeroStr]}
Here is what I discovery since my Mac OS doesn't use all the easy answers. I used the jot command to generate a number since the $RANDOM variable solutions seems not to be very random in my test. When testing my solution I had a wide variance in the solutions provided in the output.
RANDOM1=`jot -r 1 1 235886`
#range of jot ( 1 235886 ) found from earlier wc -w /usr/share/dict/web2
echo $RANDOM1
head -n $RANDOM1 /usr/share/dict/web2 | tail -n 1
The echo of the variable is to get a visual of the generated random number.
Using only vanilla sed and awk, and without using $RANDOM, a simple, space-efficient and reasonably fast "one-liner" for selecting a single line pseudo-randomly from a file named FILENAME is as follows:
sed -n $(awk 'END {srand(); r=rand()*NR; if (r<NR) {sub(/\..*/,"",r); r++;}; print r}' FILENAME)p FILENAME
(This works even if FILENAME is empty, in which case no line is emitted.)
One possible advantage of this approach is that it only calls rand() once.
As pointed out by #AdamKatz in the comments, another possibility would be to call rand() for each line:
awk 'rand() * NR < 1 { line = $0 } END { print line }' FILENAME
(A simple proof of correctness can be given based on induction.)
Caveat about rand()
"In most awk implementations, including gawk, rand() starts generating numbers from the same starting number, or seed, each time you run awk."
-- https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Numeric-Functions.html