One liner program

History

The word One-liner has two references in the index of the book The AWK Programming Language (the book is often referred to by the abbreviation TAPL). It explains the programming language AWK, which is part of the Unix operating system. The authors explain the birth of the one-liner paradigm with their daily work on early Unix machines:

The 1977 version had only a few built-in variables and predefined functions. It was designed for writing short programs […] Our model was that an invocation would be one or two lines long, typed in and used immediately. Defaults were chosen to match this style […] We, being the authors, knew how the language was supposed to be used, and so we only wrote one-liners.

Notice that this original definition of a one-liner implies immediate execution of the program without any compilation. So, in a strict sense, only source code for interpreted languages qualifies as a one-liner. But this strict understanding of a one-liner was broadened in 1985 when the IOCCC introduced the category of Best One Liner for C, which is a compiled language.

Examples

One-liners are also used to show off the differential expressive power of programming languages. Frequently, one-liners are used to demonstrate programming ability. Contests are often held to see who can create the most exceptional one-liner.

C

The following example is a C program (a winning entry in the "Best one-liner" category of the IOCCC).

This one-liner program is a glob pattern matcher. It understands the glob characters `*' meaning `zero or more characters' and `?' meaning exactly one character, just like most Unix shells.

Run it with two args, the string and the glob pattern. The exit status is 0 (shell true) when the pattern matches, 1 otherwise. The glob pattern must match the whole string, so you may want to use * at the beginning and end of the pattern if you are looking for something in the middle. Examples:

AWK

The TAPL book contains 20 examples of one-liners (A Handful of Useful awk One-Liners) at the end of the book's first chapter.

Here are the very first of them:

1. Print the total number of input lines: END { print NR }
2. Print the tenth input line: NR == 10
3. Print the last field of every input line: { print $NF }

J

Here are examples in J:

1. A function avg to return the average of a list of numbers: avg=: +/ % #
2. Quicksort:

Perl

Here are examples in the Perl programming language:

Look for duplicate words

perl -0777 -ne 'print "$.: doubled $_ " while /(w+)s+1/gi'

Find Palindromes in /usr/dict/words

perl -lne 'print if $_ eq reverse' /usr/dict/words

in-place edit of *.c files changing all foo to bar

perl -p -i.bak -e 's/foo/bar/g' *.c

Many one-liners are practical. For example, the following Perl one-liner will reverse all the bytes in a file:

While most Perl one-liners are imperative, Perl's support for anonymous functions, closures, map, filter (grep) and fold (List::Util::reduce) allows the creation of 'functional' one-liners.

This one-liner creates a function that can be used to return a list of primes up to the value of the first parameter:

It can be used on the command line, like this:

perl -e'$,=",";print sub { grep { $a=$_; !grep { !($a % $_) } (2..$_-1)} (2..$_[0]) }->(shift)' number

to print out a comma-separated list of primes in the range 2 - number.

Haskell

The following Haskell program is a one-liner: it sorts its input lines ASCIIbetically.

An even shorter version:

Usable on the command line like:

Racket

The following Racket program is equivalent to the above Haskell example:

and this can be used on the command line as follows:

racket -e '(for-each displayln (sort (port->lines) string<?))'

Python

Performing one-liners directly on the Unix command line can be accomplished by using Python's -cmd flag (-c for short), and typically requires the import of one or more modules. Statements are separated using ";" instead of newlines. For example, to print the last field of unix long listing:

ls -l | python -c "import sys;[sys.stdout.write(' '.join([line.split(' ')[-1]])) for line in sys.stdin]"

Python wrappers

Several open-source scripts have been developed to facilitate the construction of Python one-liners. Scripts such as pyp or Pyline import commonly used modules and provide more human-readable variables in an attempt to make Python functionality more accessible on the command line. Here is a redo of the above example (printing the last field of a unix long listing):

Executable libraries

The Python CGIHTTPServer module for example is also an executable library that performs as a web server with CGI. To start the web server enter:

Windows PowerShell

Find palindromes in file words.txt

Piping semantics in PowerShell help enable complex scenarios with one-liner programs. This one-liner in PowerShell script takes a list of names and counts from a comma-separated value file, and returns the sum of the counts for each name.