Weird Files...

[jc at trillian.mit.edu]

--------

christoph wrote:
| Derek Martin wrote:
| >   $ ls -i  |grep f2
| >   33845  -f2
| >   $ find . -inum 33845 -exec rm {} \;
|
| this is equal to 'rm ./-f2'


I wonder what the most abstruse way to remove a file might be?

A few years back, I read a few funny articles about a  gang  who  had
responded  to  the ongoing attempts to find efficient sort algorithms
by starting a project to discover the  most  inefficient  known  sort
algorithms.   Part of the rules were that you couldn't just make your
program gratuitously inefficient by writing a busy loop to waste  cpu
time; every part of the code had to be relevant to the sort.

The last I saw this, the winner  was  a  scheme  that  systematically
generated  random  permutations  of  the  list,  and  tested each for
sortedness.  But there might be a worse one by now.

The above use of find to locate a (known) file by inum and remove  it
is  certainly a contender, and all the steps are actually required by
the algorithm.  It's even  more  wasteful  than  loading  the  entire
directory into an editor and telling the editor to delete the file.

I wonder if we can discover a worse scheme?

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