{"id":22377,"date":"2014-08-12T09:40:32","date_gmt":"2014-08-12T07:40:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/?p=22377"},"modified":"2014-08-12T09:44:57","modified_gmt":"2014-08-12T07:44:57","slug":"what-is-the-shortest-and-most-effective-code-ever-written","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2014\/08\/12\/what-is-the-shortest-and-most-effective-code-ever-written\/","title":{"rendered":"What is the shortest and most effective code ever written?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Quora runs the question<\/a>, that by now has plenty of awesome answers. \u00a0But this one<\/a> is my favorite so far:<\/p>\n

The ‘true’ program in Unix from the 1970s was an empty file. The shell interpreted that as a shell script which ran and resulted in no error status, so the result was zero. Zero is the shell exit code value that represents ‘success’ or ‘true’ within if<\/em> and while<\/em> clauses.<\/p>\n

So, no program can be shorter than that. And it was entirely effective at meeting its specification.<\/p>\n

False was much longer, being<\/p>\n

exit 1<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once lawers got in, both programs were sullied with plenty of copyrights. BSD also eventually established a format for identifying shell scripts explicitly, and those codes got added to the file too. Eventually, ‘true’ stretched to hundreds of bytes of copyrights on top of the shell script format intro code. Now, annoyingly, Linux and Mac OS have made it a compiled binary program. In Ubuntu, it is a 22K binary with an 18K code size. Ugh.<\/p>\n

At least writing a correct C program for true can be very short. It is one of the few C programs that should require no #include files, and can be simply:<\/p>\n

int main(void){return 0;}<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of course make sure to add lots of copyright notices.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n

Quora runs the question, that by now has plenty of awesome answers. \u00a0But this one is my favorite so far: The ‘true’ program in Unix from the 1970s was an empty file. The shell interpreted that as a shell script which ran and resulted in no error status, so the result was zero. Zero is … Continue reading What is the shortest and most effective code ever written?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1,6,18,62],"tags":[286,253],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-22377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-linux","category-programming","category-technology","tag-history","tag-unix"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7578,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2004\/06\/15\/learn-unix-shell\/","url_meta":{"origin":22377,"position":0},"title":"Learn UNIX shell","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"June 15, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"There is a very nice shell tutorial at LinuxCommand.Org. Not only it covers all the stuff like conditions, loops, and functions, but it also provides a list of resources to continue your education on the matter. The language is simple and the examples are clear. There is also a nice\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10208,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2006\/06\/23\/daily-del-icio-us-bookmarks\/","url_meta":{"origin":22377,"position":1},"title":"Daily del.icio.us bookmarks","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"June 23, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2006-06-22 All about Linux: Bash Shell Shortcuts Tagged as: bash code console documentation gnu howto keyboard linux list manual productivity reference shell shortcuts software sysadmin tips tricks unix \u00d0\u0153\u00d1\u2039 \u00d0\u00b1\u00d1\u2039\u00d0\u00bb\u00d0\u00b8 \u00d0\u00b2 \u00d0\u00b0\u00d1\u20ac\u00d0\u00bc\u00d0\u00b8\u00d0\u00b8 -- \u00d0\u017e\u00d1\u201a\u00d0\u00bb\u00d0\u00b8\u00d1\u2021\u00d0\u00bd\u00d1\u2039\u00d0\u00b9 \u00d0\u00bf\u00d0\u00b5\u00d1\u20ac\u00d0\u00b5\u00d0\u00b2\u00d0\u00be\u00d0\u00b4 \"You're in the army now\" Tagged as: army\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9876,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2006\/01\/30\/best-shell-alias-ever\/","url_meta":{"origin":22377,"position":2},"title":"Best shell alias ever","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"January 30, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"I came across the best shell alias ever: alias up=\"cd ..\" This is one of those things that make me go \"Why didn't I thought of it earlier? And myself?\". In order to add some value to this post, here are my two mostly used aliases: alias pd=\"perldoc\" alias pdf=\"perldoc\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":27448,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2017\/03\/22\/pushdpopd-vs-cd\/","url_meta":{"origin":22377,"position":3},"title":"pushd\/popd vs. cd","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"March 22, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"My shell of choice and circumstance for most of my Linux life was Bash. \u00a0So, naturally, in my head, shell pretty much equals Bash, and I rarely think or get into situations when this is not true. \u00a0Recently, I was surprised by a script failure, which left me scratching my\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8009,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2004\/10\/06\/copying-files-to-remote-destinations-with-bells-and-whistles\/","url_meta":{"origin":22377,"position":4},"title":"Copying files to remote destinations. With bells and whistles.","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"October 6, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"If you ever had to copy a file from one machine to another over a network, chances are you know more than one way to do it by now. Especially if you were doing it on some Unix machine. If you are still struggling, here is a short list to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9157,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2005\/06\/25\/daily-del-icio-us-bookmarks\/","url_meta":{"origin":22377,"position":5},"title":"Daily del.icio.us bookmarks","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"June 25, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-06-25 del.icio.us direc.tor: Delivering A High-Performance AJAX Web Service Broker :: Johnvey Tagged as: ajax browsers delicious javascript search tags web xml Google Maps Standalone Mode Tagged as: google googlemaps hack hacks map maps technology xml Jazz | All About Jazz Tagged as:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "All"","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22377\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22377"},{"taxonomy":"keyring_services","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/keyring_services?post=22377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}