> echo "hello world"

I count 18 bytes in that program. Too long!

I left a definitive answer on Quora some years ago:

https://www.quora.com/What-programming-language-has-the-shor...

Those 18 bytes aren't the binary, they're just the command to call the program. Don't count it just as you wouldn't count the length of the filename and its arguments for a regular executable.

If you insist on categorizing `echo "hello world"` as the invocation, rather than the program, then what is the program under your categorization? I'll submit that it is the `echo` binary, which is a whopping 35kB on my machine.

I'll just observe that there is no way to compress "hello world" below a certain size (definitely not to size 0). If you think you have, you've just "moved" it into, say, the framework/os/input/algorithm/etc.

But this fun little debate we're having here is actually connected to some deep theoretical questions, like Kolmogorov complexity, its invariance theorem, and applications to the concept of data compression [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

I’m intrigued, please share your 100% text compression rate algorithm!

Just make sure you have a filesystem that can take arbitrary-length filenames! Then you can compress to zero byte file with a very long filename ;)

I guess if you store the filetable in unlimited S3 storage, maybe ;-)

TXT records in Route 53 for 100% SLA

Infinity compression.

I once ran gzip and infinite number of times on a text file. I was surprised at the result.

I'm pretty sure part of the contract with gzip (and compression in general) is that applying it N times is undone by decompressing N times.

The size definitely gets bigger with each iteration:

  $ echo text >0.txt
  $ for i in {0..9}; do                             
  gzip <$i.txt >$((i + 1)).txt
  done
  $ ls | sort -n | xargs -n1 wc -c
       5 0.txt
      25 1.txt
      46 2.txt
      69 3.txt
      82 4.txt
     105 5.txt
     120 6.txt
     143 7.txt
     161 8.txt
     184 9.txt
     207 10.txt

He doesn't have the results, yet. He's running it in an infinite number of times.

Without actually checking, the result is going to be that the output size increases slightly over time.

I was in quantum space at the time so results are hard to translate. The best approximation to our current reality is a black hole.

How about this, assuming there must be a stand-alone "binary":

  cd /tmp
  echo 'echo $0' > hello\ world
  chmod +x hello\ world
  PATH=. hello\ world

I am afraid it requires "echo" runtime environment, doesn't it?

yes but it’s very easy to install if you have npm

That almost launched a sip of morning coffee... Well played!

echo is actually a bash builtin, so, not really, unless you're using another shell that doesn't have builtin echo.

whoosh...

You can skip "echo" and let the error message output "hello world" along with extra text!

My hello world in php. Requires php.

Hello World

Are you sure that is zero bytes?