Dunkelstern Mobile Blog

Well I am writing this in english for all people who find programming is an art for itself.

I just submitted an entry to a code obfuscation contest. The challenge was "write a replacement for the unix command 'cat'"

Here is my contribution:

#!/bin/bash

do_stuff()
{
        c=`caller|cut -d " " -f 1`
        if [ $c -eq 55 ] || [ $c -eq 61 ] ; then
                lc=`wc -l "$1"|cut -d " " -f 1`
                do_stuff "$1" "$lc"
        fi
        if [ $c -eq 51 ] ; then
                echo "Usage: $1 [-h|--help] [<filename>]" 1>&2
                echo "" 1>&2
                echo "  -h or --help    display this help" 1>&2
                echo "" 1>&2
                echo "If no <filename> is specified $1 will use stdin as default" 1>&2
                echo "If you want to use a file named -h or --help use an empty argument" 1>&2
                echo "(like '--') as the first argument." 1>&2
                exit 0
        fi
        if [ $c -eq 8 ] ; then
                lc="$2"
                l=0
                exec 3<"$1"
                while head -n1 <&3 ; do
                        l=$(( $l + 1 ))
                        do_stuff $l $lc
                        if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then
                                return
                        fi
                done
        fi
        if [ $c -eq 67 ] ; then
                sed -e "" <&0
        fi
        if [ $c -eq 26 ] ; then
                [ "$1" != "" ] && [ "$2" != "" ] && if [ $1 -eq $2 ] ; then
                        return 0
                else
                        return 1
                fi
                return 1
        fi
        if [ $c -eq 57 ] || [ $c -eq 63 ] ; then
                echo "$1: file '$2' not existing or not readable!" 1>&2
                exit 1
        fi
}

if [ "$1" != "" ] ; then
        if [ "$1" = "-h" ] || [ "$1" = "--help" ] ; then
                do_stuff "$0"
        fi
        if [ "$1" = "--" ] ; then
                if [ -r "$2" ] ; then
                        do_stuff "$2"
                else
                        do_stuff "$0" "$2"
                fi
        else
                if [ -r "$1" ] ; then
                        do_stuff "$1"
                else
                        do_stuff "$0" "$1"
                fi
        fi
else
        do_stuff
fi

For all those who are brave enough to try it (yes it works flawlessly but very very slooooow) you can download it here (better download it, as one inserted line may break the complete program): http://www.kdemod.ath.cx/~dunkelstern/cat.sh

Please comment on it, and may the most obfuscated program win :)

PS: Contest is here: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=261892#p261892