Shell packer

Give Shellpack lines of text, and shellpack compresses them to a minimal count of command line expressions needed to evaluate to the specified parameters.

An example data set:

bisqwit@mist:~/src/shellpack$ grep sfnet ~bisqwit/.snewsrc|head -n 5|sed 's/:.*//'            
sfnet.atk.ohjelmointi
sfnet.atk.ohjelmointi.moderoitu
sfnet.atk.ohjelmointi.alkeet
sfnet.tiede.matematiikka
sfnet.tiede.fysiikka

Compressing:

bisqwit@mist:~/src/shellpack$ grep sfnet ~bisqwit/.snewsrc|head -n 5|sed 's/:.*//'|./shellpack
sfnet.{atk.ohjelmointi{,.alkeet,.moderoitu},tiede.{fys,matemat}iikka}

Testing:

bisqwit@mist:~/src/shellpack$ for s in sfnet.{atk.ohjelmointi{,.alkeet,.moderoitu},tiede.{fys,matemat}iikka};do echo "$s";done
sfnet.atk.ohjelmointi
sfnet.atk.ohjelmointi.alkeet
sfnet.atk.ohjelmointi.moderoitu
sfnet.tiede.fysiikka
sfnet.tiede.matematiikka

So yep, it works. It sorts the input while doing that, too.

Okay, there are some bugs. You will probably find them when testing this. Try 1.0, it is not so bugful. But it is a lot slower too.
Maybe somebody would like to make version 3.0? :)

shellpack has been written by Joel Yliluoma, a.k.a. Bisqwit,
and is distributed under the following terms:

* No warranty. You are free to modify this source and to
* distribute the modified sources, as long as you keep the
* existing copyright messages intact and as long as you
* remember to add your own copyright markings.
* You are not allowed to distribute the program or modified versions
* of the program without including the source code (or a reference to
* the publicly available source) and this notice with it.

The official home page of shellpack is at http://oktober.stc.cx/source/shellpack.html .
Check there for new versions.