The Twelve Days of Programmers Shell Script
George Ruban

Once I had the inexplicable urge to create a Unix shell (sh) script that prints "The Twelve Days of Christmas". So I did. Here it is, in clear-text form, and in an encoded form (ROT-13 encoding) which decodes itself as it runs, so you can mail it to people who will have to run it to find out what it does.

To run it,

Go to a Unix system
Save the program (a set of the lines in monospace format) as a file, called, for example program
Make the file executable, by typing
```
chmod +x program
```
Execute it, simply by typing the program name,
```
program
```

Unencoded

#!/bin/sh
# Shell script which prints The Twelve Days of Programmers
# Written by George Ruban, 12-24-97
# http://www.GeoCities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/2013 
# reproduce freely, with this notice
 
ordinal="first second third fourth fifth sixth seventh eighth ninth tenth \
    eleventh twelfth"
 
n=1
 
for gift in \
    "a shell script that prints this poem." \
    "two core dumps," \
    "three broken master makes," \
    "four fatal errors," \
    "five golden files..." \
    "six spaghetti-code subroutines," \
    "seven segmentation violations," \
    "eight unreproducible bugs," \
    "nine annoyed customers," \
    "ten terrified sales-reps," \
    "eleven exultant competitors," \
    "twelve terminated programmers,"
do
    poem="$gift N $poem"
    num=`echo $ordinal | cut -d' ' -f $n`
    echo "On the" $num "day of Christmas, my hacker gave to me N" \
        $poem | tr N '\12'
    if [ $n -eq 1 ] ; then poem="and $poem" ; fi
    sleep $n
    n=`expr $n + 1`
done

Encoded

#!/bin/sh
# Written by George Ruban, 12-24-97
# http://www.GeoCities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/2013 
# reproduce freely, with this notice

o="svefg frpbaq guveq sbhegu svsgu fvkgu friragu rvtugu avagu gragu \
    ryriragu gjrysgu" ; n=1
for g in "n furyy fpevcg gung cevagf guvf cbrz." "gjb pber qhzcf," \
    "guerr oebxra znfgre znxrf," "sbhe sngny reebef," "svir tbyqra svyrf..." \
    "fvk fcnturggv-pbqr fhoebhgvarf," "frira frtzragngvba ivbyngvbaf," \
    "rvtug haercebqhpvoyr ohtf," "avar naablrq phfgbzref," \
    "gra greevsvrq fnyrf-ercf," "ryrira rkhygnag pbzcrgvgbef," \
    "gjryir grezvangrq cebtenzzref..."
do
    p="$g N $p"
    m=`echo $o | cut -d' ' -f $n`
    echo "Oa gur $m qnl bs Xznf, zl unpxre tnir gb zr N" \
        $p | tr '[a-z]N' '[n-z][a-m]\12'
    if [ $n -eq 1 ]; then p="naq $p"; fi
    sleep $n
    n=`expr $n + 1`
done

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The Twelve Days of Programmers Shell Script George Ruban

Unencoded

Encoded

The Twelve Days of Programmers Shell Script
George Ruban