Brian Raiter has done a fine job of stepping through his executable
weight-watchers program, check it out if you haven't yet!
(it was slashdotted on saturday... the primary server has recovered)

"This document explores methods for squeezing excess bytes out of simple
programs. (Of course, the more practical purpose of this document is to
describe a few of the inner workings of the ELF file format and the
Linux operating system. But hopefully you can also learn something about
how to make really teensy ELF executables in the process.)" 

http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html

and, an excerpt from near the end of the document:
"This forty-five-byte file is less than one-eighth the size of the
smallest ELF executable we could create using the standard tools, and is
less than one-fiftieth the size of the smallest file we could create
using pure C code. We have stripped everything out of the file that we
could, and put to dual purpose most of what we couldn't.
Of course, half of the values in this file violate some part of the ELF
standard, and it's a wonder than Linux will even consent to sneeze on
it, much less give it a process ID. This is not the sort of program to
which one would normally be willing to confess authorship."


woo-hoo, let's hear it for the frontier between spec and possibility!

cheerio,

    ben

-- 
--
Ben Barrett
Software & Systems Engineer
counterclaim
Phone: 541.484.9235
Fax:  541.484.9193

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