Re: elisp question

[Stefan Monnier]

> The files are in a subdirectory (called kaya), numbered 1 to whatever,
> so I want to randomly pick an integer from 1 to whatever.  I thought
> that (find-file) or perhaps (find-file-noselect) could be used in
> conjunction with (random), but I can't figure out how to do that.
> I've probably missed someting really bloody obvious in the elisp
> manual...

(pop-to-buffer
 (find-file-noselect (expand-file-name (number-to-string (random N))
                                       "foo/bar/kaya")))

This assumes the file names go from 0 to N-1.

You could also do

  (let ((files (directory-files "foo/bar/kaya" 'full "[^.]\\|...")))
    (pop-to-buffer (find-file-noselect (nth (random (length files)) files))))

and just select any random file in the directory, without any assumption on
the file names used.


        Stefan