Author:

• Name: Andrew T. Shapiro
  Location: ZZ - Unknown location
  
  

To build:

make all

Bugs and (Mis)features:

The current status of this entry is:

STATUS: missing file - please provide it
STATUS: INABIAF - please **DO NOT** fix

For more detailed information see 1994 shapiro bugs.

To use:

./shapiro &

Now find the clock in the same terminal window (or console if at the console).

Try:

./shapiro
^Z
bg
ps x
fg
^C

./shapiro_t1

Notice what you see in the output of ps! Observe too what happens after you bring it back to the foreground.

Judges’ remarks:

This entry has many different levels of obfuscation, and yet the source file is self documenting. :-)

From time to time, run ps(1) and look at the new processes.

See shapiro.html for more information in the internals of this program. The file shapiro.alt.c contains a non-obfuscated version of this program. Note that this alt file is currently missing. See 1994 shapiro bugs for details.

Author’s remarks:

The basic theme (pun) of this program is:

“This time (everything) is not where it should be.” ~~~~

My entry (shapiro.c) is mostly comments, formatted in the shape of a clock. If you strip out the comments and look at the code you will quickly realize that the comments were the important part and that the code does very little (see pun above). It writes (to stdout) another C program (shapiro_t2.c). This is the first level of obfuscation.

The second program (shapiro_t2.c (use make everything first) prints a clock in the upper right hand corner of your VTxxx/ANSI display.

Most of the surface obfuscation in the second program (shapiro_t2.c) was an attempt to make it as small as possible. You should be able to see around this with cb(1) and some more intelligent variable names. Once you get past this you will realize that the third level of obfuscation is a six member client/server hierarchy. (See the shapiro.html web page for a detailed description of the algorithm.)

lint complains about: precedence confusion, K may be used before set, main() returns random value to invocation environment, value type used inconsistently, value type declared inconsistently, function argument (number) used inconsistently, function returns value which is always ignored, function returns value which is sometimes ignored. All of which are harmless (famous last words).

This may or may not work on non ASCII systems (I could not find one to test it on.)

Inventory for 1994/shapiro

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Primary files

• shapiro.c - entry source
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• shapiro.orig.c - original source
• shapiro.html - author hints
• 1994_shapiro.tar.bz2 - download entry source

Secondary files

• index.html - entry home page
• README.md - markdown source for index.html
• .entry.json - description of entry in JSON
• .gitignore - list of files that should not be committed under git
• .path - directory path from top directory
• shapiro.md - markdown source for shapiro.html