Thread: How to make a program that prints it's own source code???

Originally Posted by Anddos

cpjust what kind of reply is that , i am only trying to help , keep your comments to your self

I'm trying to help too -- helping people from writing useless programs.
In any case, Laserlight already answered the question a while ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_%28computing%29

Actually one of the challenges on this site is to write a quine. There's even a nice solution to it.

http://www.cprogramming.com/challeng...elf_print.html

Actually quines do have some uses. Some viruses that are built with showing off in mind (core wars) will make copies of themselves by outputting their own source code into a text folder and compiling itself. Well you can kind of call that a use...

Originally Posted by A10

Actually one of the challenges on this site is to write a quine. There's even a nice solution to it.

http://www.cprogramming.com/challeng...elf_print.html

Actually quines do have some uses. Some viruses that are built with showing off in mind (core wars) will make copies of themselves by outputting their own source code into a text folder and compiling itself. Well you can kind of call that a use...

Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier to just copy the existing executable rather than recompile itself?

I doubt if they still remain quines but for one thing they can make some changes in their source and then compile!
A kind of self evolving virus

Originally Posted by matsp

Not if you are doing the original worm (as the son of the NSA director did in the late 1990's or so), which walked across machine architectures, as long as the machine had a version of Unix installed, it would attempt to compile and install itself. Since machines where of differing architectures, you couldn't just copy the binary...

--
Mats

So you mean the virus telnets into a machine, finds the compiler, spits out it's source code, compiles and remotely executes the new version?

Originally Posted by cpjust

Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier to just copy the existing executable rather than recompile itself?

That's not NEARLY as cool though