It's a birthday #!/bin/bash

March 19, 2012 3:32 PM

In search of nerdy birthday bash one (or two) liner.

A friend of mine is an obsessive scripter, and I wanted to put a 1 or 2 liner on a flask I was going to get engraved for him. Right now it looks like it would have to fit in two 20 character lines. One ideas was his birthday in secs passed through date, but thought maybe folks had other creative ideas.

posted by mrzarquon to computers & internet (9 answers total)

For a flask? I would do:

10 DRINK
20 GOTO 10
posted by burnmp3s at 3:45 PM on March 19, 2012 [3 favorites]

BASIC wasn't what I had in mind.

Something that could actually be machine parseable would be great, and the more obfuscated the better. If it ends up being too big to put on the flask itself, I might just tuck it into a script I host on my server and give him this on the flask instead:

curl http://website/script | /bin/bash
posted by mrzarquon at 4:07 PM on March 19, 2012

:(){ :|:& };:

Warning: do not run this yourself.
posted by grouse at 4:09 PM on March 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

Here's another version:

drink () { drink | drink & }; drink
posted by grouse at 4:14 PM on March 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

80023
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 4:14 PM on March 19, 2012

BASIC wasn't what I had in mind.

Oops I read "birthday bash" as a type of party rather than a type of script that you can engrave onto a gift at a party. Parsing error!

Also make sure you figure out in advance if the engraving service supports whatever random non-alphanumeric symbols you end up using. A lot of times what the form they let you fill out on their website permits them but their actual printing setup does not.
posted by burnmp3s at 4:18 PM on March 19, 2012

A little googling has shown me that there are a handful of laser engraving shops here in PDX, who will do any amount of artwork as long as it fits on the piece, so that opens up the potential much more than any web service (they will just take a PDF or PNG it looks like as a source material).

Right now I have (its BSD date, not GNU date):

#!/bin/bash
date -j -f "%s" 1333930013 "+%m %d, %Y"
drink(){ drink|drink& }; drink
posted by mrzarquon at 5:09 PM on March 19, 2012

Not a script, but if were giving a friend an engraved flask for a birthday, it would say-- perhaps at the end, after the script, or at the bottom:

No deposit, many happy returns.
posted by jamjam at 6:59 PM on March 19, 2012

"drink me" in HEX.
posted by stray thoughts at 9:53 PM on March 19, 2012