Author:

• Name: David Korn
  Location: US - United States of America (United States)

To build:

    make all

To use:

    ./korn

Judges’ remarks:

The Judges believe that this is the best one line entry ever received. Compile on a UNIX system, or at least one using a C implementation that fakes it. Very few people are able to determine what this program does by visual inspection. I suggest that you stop reading this section right now and see if you are one of the few people who can.

Several points are important to understand this program:

1. What is the symbol unix and what is its value in the program? Clearly unix is not a function, and since unix is not declared to be a data type (such as int, char, struct foo, enum, …) what must unix be?

2. What is the value of the symbol "have"? (hint: the value is NOT 4 characters, or 'h', or a string) Consider the fact that:

    char *x;

defines a pointer to a char (i.e. an address), and that the = assigns things of compatible types. Since:

    x = "have";

is legal C, what type of value is "have"?

3. Note that the following expressions yield the same value:

    x[3]        *(x+3)    *(3+x)

since addition is commutative. What can be said about this value?

    3[x]

David Korn’s /bin/ksh provides us with a greatly improved version of the /bin/sh. The source for v7’s /bin/sh greatly inspired this contest.

Author’s remarks:

No remarks were provided by the author.

Primary files

• korn.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• korn.orig.c - original source code

Secondary files

• 1987_korn.tar.bz2 - download entry tarball
• README.md - markdown source for this web page
• .entry.json - entry summary and manifest in JSON
• .gitignore - list of files that should not be committed under git
• .path - directory path from top level directory
• index.html - this web page

Jump to: top