Bash- scramble characters contained in a string

Question

So I have this function with the following output:

    AGsg4SKKs74s62#

I need to find a way to scramble the characters without deleting anything..aka all characters must be present after I scramble them.

I can only bash utilities including awk and sed.

Answer 1

echo 'AGsg4SKKs74s62#' | sed 's/./&\n/g' | shuf | tr -d "\n"

Output (e.g.):

S7s64#2gKAGsKs4

Answer 2

Here's a pure Bash function that does the job:

scramble() {
    # $1: string to scramble
    # return in variable scramble_ret
    local a=$1 i
    scramble_ret=
    while((${#a})); do
        ((i=RANDOM%${#a}))
        scramble_ret+=${a:i:1}
        a=${a::i}${a:i+1}
    done
}

See if it works:

$ scramble 'AGsg4SKKs74s62#'
$ echo "$scramble_ret"
G4s6s#2As74SgKK

Looks all right.