is the code of "Hecate: The Hex Editor From Hell" available to look at?

The same question here.

I was wondering about that, but is it really wrong? From what I found in the "BSD General Commands Manual":

Any arguments specified on the command line are given to utility upon each invocation, followed by some number of the arguments read from the standard input of xargs. The utility is repeatedly executed until standard input is exhausted.

and

-P maxprocs Parallel mode: run at most maxprocs invocations of utility at once.

The way I interpret that is that you could run xargs in parallel mode, but by default the "utility is repeatedly executed" in the same process.

Even in sequential mode, for a sufficiently long input xargs will invoke the command multiple times to comply with kernel limits on command line length.

If the utility is repeatedly executed then by definition it can't be a single process.

s += $7 means "add the content of the 7th column to the total"

Makes sense, thanks!

actually there is heaps of love for awk... so much actually that I'd rather spend a whole post on it than to "just" make it one item :)

Motivated by your list, I went through my history to pull some awk snowclones http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4989524

wow...that's quite some statistical data you gathered! I tried this myself using this command:

    cat ~/.bash_history | cut -f1 -d' ' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r

turns out my .bash_history is clipped at it's default size-limit (500 lines). So I'll change that to gather more data for next year. My results started with: 147 clang++ 77 ls 54 cd 15 gs 14 rake 13 vim ...

where gs is short for "git status" ...and thanks for the hint about the substitution! I updated it on my page.

Most of what I learned about C++ I got from books, blogs and some great C++ guys (mostly from the boost community). I have to admit I did not read the standard at all.

could you give an example of a case where you hit undefined behavior since I hardly seem to recall a case where that bit me in the past? (I'm mostly working on embedded systems (PPC & ARM))

The cases that come to my mind for C++ all involve initialization...

Before I give you an example, I will define what the term undefined behavior means by quoting the standard - Section §1.3.12 (of the C standard, not the C++ standard which is horribly ginormous and hard to read):

    behaviour, such as might arise upon use of an erroneous program construct or erroneous data, for which this International Standard imposes no requirements 3.

    Undefined behaviour may also be expected when this International Standard omits the description of any explicit definition of behavior.

The reason undefined behavior is dangerous is that the standard does not guarantee any particular behavior and the implementation is free to do whatever it wants - ignore it, give an error message, delete everything on your hard drive.. whatever.

The two most commonly cited piece of undefined behavior is modifying a variable twice in one sequence point. The standard says:

    Between the previous and next sequence point a scalar object shall have its stored value modified at most once by the evaluation of an expression.

This code snippet invokes undefined behavior:

    a = b++ * ++b;

because b is modified twice within one sequence point. More information here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4176328/undefined-behavio...

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For more real world examples of where undefined behavior may bite you in the ass in C++, take a look at Washu's simple C++ quiz. It's only four questions: http://www.scapecode.com/2011/05/a-simple-c-quiz/

Take a moment to answer the questions before looking at the answers.

Once you've done that, here are three more quizzes by the same guy - these ones are about OOP in C++, so may be much more relevant to your question: http://www.scapecode.com/2011/05/c-quiz-2/ and http://www.scapecode.com/2011/05/c-quiz-3/ and http://www.scapecode.com/2011/05/c-quiz-4/

@fferen, @jlarocco, @Mon_Ouie, @deckiedan: I know you can probably set up all you need within the blink of a second (using emacs or vim or a template setup). Actually I'm so hooked on this idea I even wrote my own rake based C/C++ Buildsystem (https://github.com/marcmo/cxxproject). But still sometimes I prefer not having to set up anything and not having to clean up anything after I end my experiments. ... Idea - drop into REPL and try out - exit - done.

Uuhhh...damn! I messed that up. corrected now! thanks!

I'd say error recovery could be better. You often get kicked out of the session and than your environment is lost. Also: they claim the 'auto' keyword is implicit, does not seem to work for me. But it's pretty cool to use!