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From: eeh@Dixie.Com (Ed Howland)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Shortest Perl and Awk programs
Keywords: Awk Perl "The Unix Programing Environment"
Message-ID: <9004@rsiatl.Dixie.Com>
Date: 31 Mar 91 18:54:53 GMT
Organization: Dixie Communications Services
Lines: 15


This post might not belong here, but since there is no group for purely
Awk programming, I though I might ask here. In the book "The Unix Programming
Environment", by Kernighan and Pike, there is an excelent introduction to 
'awk', which I learned to program in it. I was re-reading this the other day 
and came upon the question: "What is the shortest awk program that just copies
its input to its output?" I came up with :

	!0

Is there anything shorter? Why does'nt just '1' (or any non-zero value) work?
Also, does this hold true to perl? (Sorry I don't know perl well enough to
to even guess.) What would be the shortest perl program to do this?

	Ed Howland 	:	uucp: ..emory!rsiatl!eeh