how to detect chef

If you want your program to detect when it's being run by chef, here's one way to do that.

sleep 1 while $ENV{PATH} =~ m#chef[^:]+/bin#;

This works because Chef's shell_out adds Gem.bindir to PATH, which is something like /opt/chefdk/embedded/bin.

You may want to delete the "sleep", which will make it run faster.

Would I or anyone ever really do this? Chef Inc's management seems determined to test the question, don't they.

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turing complete version numbers

A quick standard for when you want to embed an arbitrary program in the version number of your program.

2   increment the data pointer (to point to the next cell to the right).
3   decrement the data pointer (to point to the next cell to the left).
+   increment (increase by one) the byte at the data pointer.
-   decrement (decrease by one) the byte at the data pointer.
.   output the byte at the data pointer.
4   accept one byte of input, storing its value in the byte at the data pointer.
6   if the byte at the data pointer is zero, then instead of moving the instruction pointer forward to the next command, jump it forward to the command after the matching 9 command.
9   if the byte at the data pointer is nonzero, then instead of moving the instruction pointer forward to the next command, jump it back to the command after the matching 6 command.

This is simply Brainfuck with operators that are legal in (Debian) version numbers kept as-is, and some numbers replacing the rest.

Note that all other operators are ignored as usual. In particular, 1 and 8 are ignored, which make it easy to build version number programs that compare properly with past versions. And in some cases, adding 1 or 8 will be needed to make a particular program be a properly formatted version number.

For example, an infinite loop version number is:

1+69

A nice short hello world is:

1+6-6336+6-8-1-29-6333999222-92-1.1-1-1-8.2.8.2.3333-1.3+1.22222.2.33.3-1.1

Licensing: Yes, there should also be a way to embed a license in a version ... Oh, I mean to say, the Wikipedia excerpt above is CC-BY-SA, and the hello world is based on https://esolangs.org/wiki/Hello_world_program_in_esoteric_languages

Previously: a brainfuck monad

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