Author:

• Name: Kimmo Fredriksson
  Location: FI - Republic of Finland (Finland)

To build:

    make

Bugs and (Mis)features:

The current status of this entry is:

STATUS: INABIAF - please DO NOT fix

For more detailed information see 2011/fredriksson in bugs.html.

To use:

    ./fredriksson [-icvtnk#] regexp < file

Try:

    ./try.sh

NOTE: you need to be allowed to change your stack size or else the last command in the script would likely cause the program to dump core, which is why the script checks the exit code of ulimit first.

Judges’ remarks:

The author of this entry was making sure that it does not win the “Best Short Program” award. On the outside, the program behaves as an approximate grep. On the inside, it is a Burrows-Wheeler transform decompressor that produces the source code of the actual obfuscated approximate grep program and calls it. As an exercise, try writing the compressor.

Author’s remarks:

Approximate grep

Implements a variant of grep.

Usage

To search regexp from file, do:

    ./fredriksson [-icvtnk#] regexp < file

Pipes might not work, see the section Limitations. The options -i, -c, -v and -n are the classic ones:

• -i Ignore case.

• -c Count only, prints the number of matches, but not the matching lines.

• -v Invert match.

• -n Prefixes each printed line by its line number (only if -c was not given).

This version of grep recognizes two more options, not present in normal grep implementations:

• -kN Permit N insertions, deletions or mismatches of characters in the matches, aka edit-distance. E.g., “obfuscated” matches “obfuscation” with one deletion and two mismatches. Likewise, “obfuscate” and “oversimplify” match with 7 edit operations. The default is -k0 (i.e. exact match).

• -t Add local transpositions to the set of allowed edit-operations. That is, “ab” matches “ba” with one transposition (swap), and “obfuscated” matches “bofsuact” with three swaps and two insertions, i.e. use -tk5 to find this.

Of course, one could construct a standard regexp that matches the same patterns, but the problem is that such a regexp grows exponentially in size when the number of allowed edit operations is increased.

This version does not recognize all regular expressions, but the following are allowed:

• Wildcard: . (dot) matches any character.

• Bracket expression: list of characters enclosed by [ and ], matches any single character in the list.

• Range expression: two characters separated by hyphen and enclosed in brackets, matches any character that is lexicographically between the two characters (inclusive). E.g. [a-d] is the same as [abcd].

The special characters must be escaped, if they are to be taken literally (e.g. \. to match period). You might want to protect these with ', i.e. use 'foo\[bar' instead of foo\[bar. If you want to use the literal - in bracket expression, protect that too (\-), otherwise this is not needed. Note that the syntax differs from standard (?) grep a bit, i.e. in plain grep you can use ] and - in bracket expressions by putting ] as the first character, and putting - last.

Other uses

• You can use this in place of cat. Just say

    ./fredriksson -k3 cat < file

• Like with cat, you can append line numbers too:

    ./fredriksson -nk3 cat < file

Other features

• It is assumed that the user knows how to feed correct input to the program. If undefined options are given, the result is also undefined. This is a feature.

• It may consume huge amounts of memory, and a stack overflow may occur. This results in Segmentation fault (or the equivalent of your favorite system, such as Bus error). This is a feature, that can be used to detect overly long lines in the input file, such as checking the length of one liners in IOCCC entries, just adjust your stack size to a suitable threshold, and search for “ioccc”, with option -vk5.

Limitations and remarks

• Using warning options (such as -Wall) when building gives a lot of warning, such as “suggest parentheses around '&&' within '||'”, “value computed is not used”, “implicit declaration of function 'putchar'”, “implicit declaration of function 'getchar'”, “control reaches end of non-void function” and “format not a string literal and no format arguments”. Please ignore them all, since they just try to tell you that the source is obfuscated.

• Only standard input is handled. And only if stdin comes from a file, i.e. pipes may or may not work. If you want to count only (-c option), then this shouldn’t be an issue.

• The total length of the (preprocessed) pattern is at most sizeof(long)*CHAR_BIT. That does not count things like bracket expressions or escape chars, that is, the pattern 'a[bcd]e\.f' is 5 chars long, not 10 chars. That does not mean that the matched substring in the standard input has this limit, as using the edit operations can make the string longer. However, no assumptions are made for sizeof(long). In fact, you can easily use long long instead,

• Depending on the file, it might require a lot of stack space. If the program segfaults (because of this), say

    ulimit -s unlimited

cross your fingers, hope it is enough, and try again.

• Assumes C99 standard, because of the one very long line. Most C compilers handle this just fine even in C89 mode, though.

• The code should be reasonably portable, it assumes standard ASCII codes for each char, and that a C compiler is on $PATH; the latter is hard coded to be ‘gcc’, but any compiler would work, provided that it supports C99, or long lines as an extension. This code has been tested on:

  • GNU/Linux FC4, i386, gcc
  • GNU/Linux FC7, x86_64, gcc 4.1.2, tcc 0.9.24 and icc 10.0 (Btw, tcc has its roots in IOCCC…)
  • GNU/Linux FC9, x86_64, gcc 4.?.?
  • GNU/Linux CentOS 5, gcc 4.1.2
  • GNU/Linux Ubuntu 11.04, gcc 4.5.2
  • SunOS 5.8, UltraSPARC IIIi, gcc 4.1.2
  • SunOS 5.9, UltraSPARC IIIi, gcc 4.1.1 and Sun ONE Studio 8 CC
  • AIX 5.3, IBM eServer p5-550, gcc 3.3.3 and AIX CC Version 6

NOTICE to those who wish for a greater challenge:

If you want a greater challenge, don’t read any further: just try to understand the program via the source.

If you get stuck, come back and read below for additional hints and information.

How this entry works:

• The initialized char array includes the source code of the real program, as well as its name and commands to build and run it, all Burrows-Wheeler -transformed, then run-length-encoded with unary coding. The main program extracts and builds that, and then calls it. More precisely, the command to build is

    gcc -O3 ag.c -o ag

To change that you need to edit the char array p[] and (possibly) two specially encoded constants, -~('('*'(') and 'C'*' '-'-'. The extracted source (ag.c) is obfuscated as well.

(The original version also deleted the generated source and the corresponding binary after running it, but this feature was removed from the submitted entry.)

• The code demonstrates several useful programming paradigms, such as:

  • recursion to remove all loops
  • subroutines (main() contains several logical subroutines, selected by the first argument)
  • function pointers

• Algorithmically, it incorporates the following:

  • (inverse) Burrows-Wheeler transform (used also e.g. in bzip2(1))
  • data compression (really expansion :-), run-length-encoding, unary coding (this is why it is expansion rather than compression)
  • approximate string matching
  • dynamic programming to compute the edit distance
  • parallel computation in sequential computers (by packing several objects into a single long, to speed up the dynamic programming)
  • self extracting, compiling and running code

• As a C program, it demonstrates that

  • a C subset without reserved words is complete enough, excluding data type specific things (int, char, void …)
  • only letters are needed (i.e. the digits 0-9 are not)
  • only one statement is enough to code any program (plus variable definitions)
  • white space has other uses than just indenting the code

• It also shows the power of boolean logic and bitwise arithmetic.

• This is the first (?) entry in the history of IOCCC, that cannot be totally deobfuscated by the author. This is due to the clever choice of the actual algorithm, that is obfuscated by nature, and it is an open research problem whether a simpler algorithm exists, with the same time complexity.

• The main obfuscation comes from using only arithmetic and boolean (short-circuit) logic combined with recursion to remove all loops and if-then-else constructs (also, no ternary ?: constructs are present). Two’s complement representation of integers is also abused. E.g. instead of writing x++ or x-1, it is much better to write x=-~x and ~-x.

• No numerical values, other than in the initialized char array, try

    ./fredriksson -ck0 [0-9] < fredriksson.c

This should print 1, as there is a number 3 in the char array (only). You can also try

    ./fredriksson -ck0 [0-9] < ag.c

after running fredriksson at least once (since this generates that ag.c file), and this should print 0.

• The source code is best viewed with cat (or using the program itself), instead of some editor. (This is a somewhat system dependent thing.)

  One reason for this is that the code builds (some of the) constant values from string literal "\b", except that the backspace \b is not escaped like that; the source uses the raw ASCII value (010 octal) instead. Thus when viewing with cat or something, that backspace erases the leading quotation mark. Makes it appear uncompilable, and it is: if you copy-paste the cat output from terminal to some editor, save it, the result would not compile.

  Some other constants are built from ASCII values of chars.

  Besides of making the code hard to read, all this makes it also quite large.

• Running it through GNU indent(1) or bcpp(1) (C beautifiers) does not beautify it a bit. In fact, indent makes it only worse (at least with the default options). Running it through the preprocessor does basically nothing, since no #defines are used.

• Some abuse of the rules. The number of non-whitespace and ;, { and } chars is below the limit, but most of the whitespace chars are in an initialized character array. That is, the number of chars in the program exceeds the 2048 limit. However, whitespace is whitespace and the rules did not specify that these must be in between the statements. A character is a whitespace if isspace() returns non-zero value. Even if deleting even one of those chars it breaks the program! (This does not apply to the generated source ag.c.)

Primary files

• fredriksson.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• fredriksson.orig.c - original source code
• try.sh - script to try entry

Secondary files

• 2011_fredriksson.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

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