Pick a random word from a file UNIX

perl -e 'open IN, "<FILENAME";rand($.) < 1 && ($n=$_) while <IN>;print $n'

#!/usr/bin/bash
file=/path/to/file
lines=`wc -l <$file
n=$RANDOM
let "n %= $lines"
sed -n ${n}p $file

perl -ne '$n=$_ if rand $.<1;END{print $n}' filename
perl -MTie::File -le 'tie @a,"Tie::File", "filename"; print @a[rand @a]'
awk 'rand<1/NR{n=$0}END{print n}' < filename
perl -e '@a=<>;print$a[rand@a]' filename

i know using sed or perlor awk is well worth knowin but tryn to avoid using those tools

What tools would you prefer to use?

ozo thanx again m8 allways spot on. Thankyou all for the help well apriaciated

On large files, ozo's solution will be *much* slower than my bash solution.

It's slower by about the same factor on small files too.

But there seemed to be an inexplicable desire to avoid sed.
We could have used head|tail instead, but  I didn't know if those were to be avoided too.
We could have implemented the sed function in pure bash, which would have simplified the while loop slightly, but that could still leave the wc
reimplementing wc in pure bash could mean two loops, and it seemed simpler to do it in one
even if there is a performance penalty, which might depend on the implementation.

i can't explain sed thats y i dont use it doing tutorial on using sed and awk now but for now can't xplain myself when using it so am tryin to keep everything at a level i can understand.