oz-SOLUTION(6)

NAME
oz - Clues to how oz prints the string "the perl journal"

SYNOPSIS
oz

DESCRIPTION
oz prints the string "the perl journal".

  Clue
This string is extracted from the temporary file ozp in the current directory using the system utility /bin/cat.

  Clue
This temporary file is created by running some internally generated data through the system utility uudecode. Unfortunately, uudecode does not exist on all unixoid systems, so this program may fail for some users. The implementor may include a uudecode emulator within future releases, if those releases have a sufficiently relaxed implementation schedule. Certainly there is enough room for such an emulator since the programmer did not use all the available one Kbyte of disk space and on top of that wrote some NOP code which could be replace with functional operations.

  Not A Clue
But it was more fun to use uudecode.

  Clue
The data put through uudecode is contained in the 5th column of the program. Most but not all the characters in the 5th column are used. Which is probably true of all 5th column movements, since such movements attract shady characters whose motives are not to be trusted.

  Clue
The string "uudecode" is not obviously present in the program, perhaps mystifying the programmer attempting to reverse engineer this application. If one regards column two of the program text and discards all but the upper case characters, one finds the string ETTCDBNCD. If you increment each character, you get FUUDECODE. replace the "F" with a "|" pipe symbol and lowercase it all and you have the command pipe that is opened to process the data.

  Clue
The strings "begin" and "end" required for putting data through uudecode were extracted from the first line of Perl code.

FILES
./ozp
    Temporary file.

DIAGNOSTICS
cat: ozp: No such file or directory
    Probably the directory you are running this famous utility in is not writeable by this famous you.
'syntax error at ./oz line 21, near $0p '
    Hmm, the program is corrupted and should be indited with a text inditor.
'No begin line'
    Your system fish daemon has failed to detect that you are using the net rather than a rod and reel.

IDENTIFICATION
Kenneth C. Rich, kenr@cc.rochester.edu
Copyright 1998 University Computing Center,
Box 270196, Taylor Hall, University of Rochester,
Rochester, NY   14627

SEE ALSO
uudecode (1)
oz-ident (1)

BUGS

Requires that the system utility uudecode be present in the user's command path.

Requires the system utility /bin/cat.

oz must be able to write to the current directory.

oz does not clean up its temporary file, ./ozp.