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This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in 1995; any technical information is probably outdated.

Re: Smallest Unix Shell


Article: 8816 of alt.hackers
From: wkt@dolphin.cs.adfa.oz.au (Warren Toomey)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Smallest Unix Shell
Date: 9 Oct 1995 05:10:32 GMT
Organization: Australian Defence Force Academy
Lines: 29
Approved: santa.claus
Distribution: world
Message-ID: 45aas8$arq@euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au
NNTP-Posting-Host: 131.236.20.5
Status: RO


|> Some time ago trreka@uta.fi (Reijo Kalvas) happily mumbled:
|> >Warren Toomey <wkt@dolphin.cs.adfa.oz.au> wrote:
|> >>ObHack: A challenge with a friend to come up with the smallest
|> >>Unix shell in C.
|>
|> >ObHowAbout:
|> >
|> >b[99];main{while(!system(gets(b)));}
|> >
|> >38 characters and breaks probably all rules.

Yep, system() actually calls /bin/sh, which is naughty. The shell should
be fully self-supporting.

ObHack:

	Reverse-engineering the tp, dtp and itp backup formats so I could
read our old Unix backup tapes. Getting the resulting files into a bootable
disk image which I could load onto a PDP-11 simulator would take a few
alt.hacker postings itself.

	Warren
--

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