What is your favourite bash oneliner?

Situation: I had a bunch of series I wanted to watch, files downloaded, all in their own directories. I could create a playlist that mpv would understand with ls > show.m3u. I wanted to 'riffle shuffle' them into one playlist so that I could watch one episode from each show so I could progress on all of them with no faffing around with changing playlists.

I googled for ages on how to achieve this. I saw python solutions where people loaded the strings into bumpy and then iterated over them row/column-wise rather than column/row-wise. I saw algorithms that would pop an item of each list sequentially and add them to an output list.

The bash solution was paste -d "\n" *

/r/bash Thread