hacker.org

@gfoot: At the beginning I thought that this would be easy to solve with just shell. Everything was done in shell except the final hex-bin conversion. hex-bin conversion really sux in *sh. So I chose the right tool at the right time (could be awk or something else too, it depends on the situation and filling level of the coffee machine ) At that particular point I was to lazy to re-code the whole thing in perl, the problem was solved anyway...
I'm an admin... I start typing shell commands while I'm thinking. I start programming first if this approach does not work anymore ...worked perfectly in this case.

I know what you mean - I used to do a lot of thing in shell scripts. I just kind of realised that nearly everything I was doing with shell scripts ended up, at least somewhere in the script, either messy or completely impractical. Even things that start small often grow a bit. So I decided I might as well just go straight to Python by default. Some things end up longer, but there's always os.system if you really want to run an external tool.

Gosh, reading about your nice solutions I feel ashamed by now.
As PHP is my best pick I wrote a small script to get me the filenames. Took ages anyway (just to get the idea to do so).
After putting the filenames into a single file and examination of the first pic I completely ran out of ideas (I checked the file lenghts of course but since the first few with the png header are identical to the file name I didn't look any further).
So it took me a hint from the forum to look again...

Actually I wasn't looking at the file sizes but at the content length (strlen)... just by reading this thread I did remember that this is of course the same for txt files.

Anyway, brilliant challenge!

I think this can be refined, but I'm stopping here

echo -e -n "`find ./ -name *.txt | sort | xargs ls -l | awk '{print $5}' | xargs printf "\\\\\x%x"`" > answer.png

Hmmm, I have not read the filenames. Let me see the 2nd image.

... OK as expected