Author:

• Name: Dave Burton
  Location: US - United States of America (United States)

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 2019/burton in bugs.html.

To use:

    ./prog < file

    ./cow file

Try:

    ./try.sh

Judges’ remarks:

A tiny, but punctually correct way of POSIX counting for text files. This one line, one word, 127 character beauty continues to expand the number of classic unix utilities available as winning entries.

You might find the author’s commentary on one liners interesting.

Author’s remarks:

Synopsis:

Feed it anything on stdin. The output should look familiar.

Compiles cleanly with:

    WARN="-Wno-implicit-int -Wno-missing-variable-declarations -Wno-parentheses"
    cc -Wall -Wextra -Weverything -pedantic $WARN -include stdio.h -o prog prog.c

Description:

Included is a test script, useful for the corner cases. As in all good Unix programs, it is silent upon success; any output demonstrates an error.

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 without running the command below.

If you get stuck, come back and run the following command:

    out=cat ./check.sh ./prog

Instead of checking correctness, the check.sh script can simply output the results:

Interestingly, and a spoiler here: macOS and FreeBSD implement the common utility “correctly”. CentOS and Ubuntu both share a “flawed” utility that changes output format based upon input redirection or pipeline(!). As well, the latter two also behave slightly differently on what they count as whitespace: \a and \b are both counted whitespace(!), even though the relevant man pages on these systems omit these characters from the description.

This program follows FreeBSD and macOS, the arbiters of correct for these purposes.

Limits:

Requires the C locale and ASCII character set. Input should be less than ten million octets “toavoidthisproblem”.

See Also:

You can enjoy this code from beginning to end. No whitespace was harmed in the creation of this program. All your base belong to us, but the constants seem a bit … off?

Bonus

The script cow.sh provides a closer analog, and perhaps a more useful interface.

Included is a version without compilation warnings:

    cc -Wall -Wextra -Weverything -pedantic -include stdio.h -o prog.clean prog.clean.c

Bugs

The flags are not supported. Although they could easily be added into cow.sh. This exercise left to the reader.

Primary files

• prog.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• prog.orig.c - original source code
• check.sh - test suite
• cow.sh - an alternate implementation with a useful interface
• on.one.liners.txt - on writing a winning IOCCC one-liner
• try.sh - script to try entry
• prog.clean.c - version of source without compilation warnings

Secondary files

• 2019_burton.tar.bz2 - download entry tarball
• 256 - test suite data
• 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
• newlines - more useful interface
• .path - directory path from top level directory
• index.html - this web page

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