quine - C/C++ program that prints its own source code as its output

Question

Wikipedia says it's called a quine and someone gave the code below:

char*s="char*s=%c%s%c;main(){printf(s,34,s,34);}";main(){printf(s,34,s,34);}

But, obviously you have to add

#include <stdio.h> //corrected from #include <stdlib.h>

so that the printf() could work.

Literally, since the above program did not print #include <stdio.h>, it is not a solution (?)

I am confused about the literal requirement of "print its own source code", and any purpose of this kind of problems, especially at interviews.

Answer 1

The main purpose of interview questions about quine programs is usually to see whether you've come across them before. They are almost never useful in any other sense.

The code above can be upgraded modestly to make a C99-compliant program (according to GCC), as follows:

Compilation

/usr/bin/gcc -O3 -g -std=c99 -Wall -Wextra -Wmissing-prototypes 
  -Wstrict-prototypes -Wold-style-definition quine.c -o quine

Code

#include <stdio.h>
char*s="#include <stdio.h>%cchar*s=%c%s%c;%cint main(void){printf(s,10,34,s,34,10,10);}%c";
int main(void){printf(s,10,34,s,34,10,10);}

Note that this assumes a code set where " is code point 34 and newline is code point 10. This version prints out a newline at the end, unlike the original. It also contains the #include <stdio.h> that is needed, and the lines are almost short enough to work on SO without a horizontal scroll bar. With a little more effort, it could undoubtedly be made short enough.

Test

The acid test for the quine program is:

./quine | diff quine.c -

If there's a difference between the source code and the output, it will be reported.

---

An almost useful application of "quine-like" techniques

Way back in the days of my youth, I produced a bilingual "self-reproducing" program. It was a combination of shell script and Informix-4GL (I4GL) source code. One property that made this possible was that I4GL treats { ... } as a comment, but the shell treats that as a unit of I/O redirection. I4GL also has #...EOL comments, as does the shell. The shell script at the top of the file included data and operations to regenerate the complex sequence of validation operations in a language that does not support pointers. The data controlled which I4GL functions we generated and how each one was generated. The I4GL code was then compiled to validate the data imported from an external data source on a weekly basis.

If you ran the file (call it file0.4gl) as a shell script and captured the output (call that file1.4gl), and then ran file1.4gl as a shell script and captured the output in file2.4gl, the two files file1.4gl and file2.4gl would be identical. However, file0.4gl could be missing all the generated I4GL code and as long as the shell script 'comment' at the top of the file was not damaged, it would regenerate a self-replicating file.