The Underhanded C Contest 2006 has started.
We hereby announce our second annual contest to write innocent-looking C code implementing malicious behavior. In many ways this is the exact opposite of the Obfuscated C Code Contest: in this contest you must write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should do something subtly evil.
This year's challenge: ridiculous performance degradation
For this year's challenge, imagine you are an application developer for an OS vendor. You must write portable C code that will inexplicably taaaaaake a looooooong tiiiiime when compiled and run on a competitor's OS. The program is supposed to read a set of words on stdin, and print a frequency count of unique words in lexicographical order. Essentially the output should match the command line
tr "[:space:]""[\n*]" | sort | awk 'length($0)>0' | uniq -c
Try to write a simple C program that does this, but produces as wide a disparity as possible between its runtime on one platform and runtime on another (your "competitor.")
This sounds like a lot of fun ;-) I have participated last year and will most probably do so this year...
Deadline: July 4th, 2006
