Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis

Submitted by: Adam Thornton Score: 7.58 (out of 10)
Length: 137 characters
Computer Language: Perl
Interface Language: English
Description

This is the TWIFcomp version of Mentula Macanus

Instructions

[Editor's note: 1) Yes, believe it or not, all of this is absolutely true. I have verified that there are only 138 non-whitespace characters in the submitted source code. I have followed the installation instructions, and the program works as advertised. A number of directories and files will be created on your system, and will require the stated media capacity. As far as I can tell, none of these files carry any undesirable payload; in fact, I would consider them a benefit. I will leave it to each player to figure out how this effect was achieved. 2) It is well worth installing a linux VM to try this out, even if your main system is not linux. For Windows, consider the free VMware player plus a software appliance like some flavor of Ubuntu or Fedora. For Mac, there's either VMware or Parallels. ]

REQUIREMENTS:

A system running Linux (i386, x86_64, ppc, armv5tel, or s390)
The tar and gzip utilities in $PATH somewhere
Perl at /usr/bin/perl, /usr/bin in $PATH
About 500MB free disk space (not kidding)

Instructions:

At the command prompt, type: ./mma.pl

Download: Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis (Twifcomp Edition)

Source Code:

Use the arrow to expand or collapse this section

The source code, although concise in one sense, would not display easily within this space.

I suggest downloading the source from GoogleDocs.

IF
TWIFcomp

Comments

Sun, 06/06/2010 - 05:46 — Anonymous

deconstructed

Clever. The adventure is a standard I7 file, packaged along with a Linux Inform interpreter and some Perl scripts to control it all. The mma.pl file contains these files encoded as ASCII tab and space characters (in the __DATA__ portion of the file). The script part of mma.pl converts any tab characters into spaces, then all space characters are counted and used to rewrite the original compressed (zipped and tarred) files. The zipped/tarred files are uncompressed and executed.

Definitely taking advantage of the whitespace loophole :)

Tue, 05/18/2010 - 01:12 — Anonymous

Mon, 04/26/2010 - 21:14 — Anonymous

Awesome

This is either blatant abuse of a loophole in the rules, or work of a sheer genius. Or both. Either way it's so awesome my head is about to explode.

TWIFcomp

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