#2345678901234567890123
print((stat pop)[7],$/)  # 23
print+(stat pop)[7],$/   # 22
print+(-s pop),$/        # 17
print-s pop,$/           # 14
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Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker, who'd like a job (NYC-area)
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

you missed one...

#23456789012
die-s pop,$/
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~Particle *accelerates*

I'm very new to golf and don't know the ground rules and was amazed by hans_moleman's solution and simply blown away by japhy's evolution, but.... (/me hear's the groans)...trying japhy's final answer on my win32 (that has -w permenantly enabled) system I got:

C:\test>185653 185653.pl
16Use of uninitialized value in print at C:\test\185653.pl line 1.

C:\test>
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Ignoring the warning which I could turn off, I noticed that it reports its own length (under win32 etc. etc) as 16!

So, I played and came up with this, which (on my Wi...) does a little better and (visually at least :) complies with the 'rules'

(I see a newline after the number :),

and beats japhy's by 3!...and runs with -w and no errors!

C:\test>185649 185649.pl
13
C:\test>
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And the code

C:\test>type 185649.pl
print-s pop

C:\test>
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As an aside, in a unicode world, maybe the requirements should have been "number of bytes"?

Ahh, certainly this is cheating BrowserUk {grin}.

The version of emulated DOS on your Win32 system always places new command prompt on a separate line by itself. So, even if your perl script prints just '13' without a terminating '\n', DOS would do the job for you.

However, for a Unix system I can't see how one could go shorter than just:

#12345678901234
 print-s pop,$/
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Which is 14 characters.

Surely, had japhy considered writing his golf for DOS, then the ',$/' part would be dropped thereby reducing the golf even further by 3 characters as you've pointed out ;-)

Update: To clarify, the word 'cheating' should be considered a sarcasm ;^). I didn't mean to sound offending. I very much respect BrowserUk's comment and have nothing against him pointing out the intimate features of perl running on various non *nix systems. I simply felt it would be worthwhile to also direct your attention to the minor difference in running the golf piece on Win32 and Unix systems.

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# Under Construction
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Thanks! very enlightening.

If you really do mean characters, not bytes, check out this recent thread.

perl -pe '"I lo*`+$^X$\"$]!$/"=~m%(.*)%s;$_=$1;y^`+*^e v^#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'