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[BLANK_NAME]
Level 1: 10 points
Alltime Score: 156 points
Last Logged In: November 17th, 2015
TEAM: Ødowshes


retired
15 + 85 points

Document Reproduction by [BLANK_NAME]

October 16th, 2007 9:02 PM

INSTRUCTIONS: Document reproduction.

A computer virus is a beautiful thing. It knows how to reproduce itself while the code it's reproducing is executing. I've written a very trivial virus in Perl that will find other Perl scripts in the user's current directory and infect them. It's far from interesting from a virus writer's perspective, but I felt like it might breathe some nice (artificial?) life into this task.

The virus itself documents the state of its reproduction as it runs. Source is provided in the zip file, but obviously don't go running such programs unless you know what they're doing. I take no responsibility for anything you might do with this program.


- smaller

Reproduction.png

Reproduction.png

A screenshot of a computer virus reproducing


reproduction.zip

reproduction.zip

A collection of files including source for the virus.



17 vote(s)



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6 comment(s)

Very cool.
posted by Spidere on October 16th, 2007 11:04 PM

Doesn't work on windows, though. ;)

(no subject)
posted by [BLANK_NAME] on October 16th, 2007 11:10 PM

Yeah, you need some sort of UNIX environment. cygwin would do it, though that's a lot of trouble to run a useless computer virus...

(no subject)
posted by Loki on October 16th, 2007 11:24 PM

"/usr/bin/env perl -w" is the suck on linux.

But, your virus works like a charm with the -w flag removed. (You've got a "use strict" in there anyway, so unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem to serve any purpose except to break things for many OSs.)

Nicely done. A creative and interesting take on this task. Great to see another up and coming EquivalenZ player.

-------
update: looks like I was wrong. -w is for warnings, and warnings *does* catch things that strict ignores. . . so, I guess formally one should add a "use warnings" when removing the -w. But, in this case leaving it off does no harm.

(no subject)
posted by [BLANK_NAME] on October 16th, 2007 11:30 PM

Thanks. Updated the .zip with -w-less versions.

(no subject)
posted by Charlie Fish on October 17th, 2007 4:25 PM

You rock Equivalenz!

look up in the sky!!
posted by lara black on October 17th, 2007 8:29 PM

a rising star!!!