Turing Completeness of GNU find: From mkdir-assisted Loops to Standalone Computation
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Abstract:The Unix command \texttt{find} is among the first commands taught to beginners, yet remains indispensable for experienced engineers. In this paper, we demonstrate that \texttt{find} possesses unexpected computational power, establishing three Turing completeness results using the GNU implementation (a standard in Linux distributions). (1) \texttt{find} + \texttt{mkdir} (a system that has only \texttt{find} and \texttt{mkdir}) is Turing complete: by encoding ...
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