Question

Bash, ubuntu linux.
How to select random node with xmlstarlet in bash?

Answer 1

xmlstarlet sel -B -t -c "//node()[$RANDOM mod last() + 1]" input.xml

The -B strips whitespace nodes, which you probably don’t want to select…

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I also tried using math:random() defined at exslt.org:

xmlstarlet sel -N math=http://exslt.org/math -B -t --var r='math:random()' \
 -c '//node()[round($r * last()) + 1]' -n input.xml

But it appears to use the same seed every time.