[Intermediate] /clone and $clone

Mr_K_13 · **Posted:** Sat Jul 11, 2009 9:30 pm

Cloning Challenge.

Hey my name's Kyle (Kylar on IRC), and welcome to the Cloning Challenge.

The idea of this challenge in short is to write an alias that can:

Copy itself as a new and unique alias name
Keep track of how many times it has replicated itself

Deadline: 10 days from now. Tuesday 21st July, 11am GMT

Winning

PM your entry to me, your last valid entry will be in the results.
The winner is the person with the shortest valid entry.
Every character will be included towards bytesize except Carriage Return + Line Feed combinations.

/clone

Creates a clone of itself

$clone

Returns the number of clones that the clone has made itself.
Does not create a clone

More details

Your alias must be called "clone".
Original alias and all clones will reside in remotes in clone.mrc in $mircdir.
$mircdir may contain spaces.
clone.mrc is the only file you are allowed to write to.
Clone names must be unique, new clones don't require "clone" in their name.
You don't have to worry about non-clone aliases intefering with your clone names.
If you have code that's not within the alias, it must be copied for every clone.
If I type /clone and delete all the code you originally gave me, the new clone should still work.
This means new clones should be valid entries by themselves, apart from having different alias names.
You do not have to reload the script file yourself after a clone is made.
Due to the nature of this challenge there will be no test alias.

Testing

I will create clone.mrc myself and load your original clone in for testing.
I will not restart mIRC or my computer during testing.

Other rules

Regex is allowed
Sockets and COM are not allowed.
Your code does not have to be clean.
(of course if this interferes with the functioning of your clones it will invalidate your entry.)

Example

I load the alias you send me.

File looks like:

Code:

alias clone {
   ...
}

I type: /clone

A new clone is created, the file now looks like

Code:

alias clone {
  ...
}
alias clone2 {
  ...
}

I type: //echo -a $clone
displays 1

I type: //echo -a $clone2
displays 0

I type: /clone2
clone2 will clone itself

I type: //echo -a $clone2
displays 1

I type: /clone2
clone2 will clone itself

I type: //echo -a $clone2
displays 2

File looks like:

Code:

alias clone {
  ...
}
alias clone2 {
  ...
}
alias clone3 {
  ...
}
alias clone4 {
  ...
}

Now I delete aliases clone, clone3 and clone4. clone2 should still work.

I type: /clone2
I type: /clone2
I type: /clone2

File now looks like:

Code:

alias clone2 {
  ...
}
alias clone5 {
  ...
}
alias clone6 {
  ...
}
alias clone7 {
  ...
}

I type: //echo -a $clone2
displays 5

(first 2 clones that were deleted, plus the new 3)

I type: //echo -a $clone5
displays 0

I type: //echo -a $clone6
displays 0

I type: //echo -a $clone7
displays 0

This shows how each alias only counts it's own clones and don't rely on other clones at all.
I used cloneN for all the clone names here, but you can use any valid name that isn't already being used by another clone.

Entries:
I will update this list as soon as I read and validate/invalidate your entry.

Valid

JoshR
ImK0tter
Zerg
Wims
Chid
Kol
Jaytea

Invalid

Yochai

Enjoy. =)