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Concept
One-liner program
Summary
In computer programming, a one-liner program originally was textual input to the command-line of an operating system shell that performed some function in just one line of input. In the present day, a one-liner can be
an expression written in the language of the shell;
the invocation of an interpreter together with program source for the interpreter to run;
the invocation of a compiler together with source to compile and instructions for executing the compiled program.
Certain dynamic languages for scripting, such as AWK, sed, and Perl, have traditionally been adept at expressing one-liners.
Shell interpreters such as Unix shells or Windows PowerShell allow for the construction of powerful one-liners.
The use of the phrase one-liner has been widened to also include program-source for any language that does something useful in one line.
The concept of a one-liner program has been known since the 1960s with the release of the APL programming language. With its terse syntax and powerful mathematical operators, APL allowed useful programs to be represented in a few symbols.
In the 1970s, one-liners became associated with the rise of the home computer and BASIC. Computer magazines published type-in programs in many dialects of BASIC. Some magazines devoted regular columns solely to impressive short and one-line programs.
The word One-liner also has two references in the index of the book The AWK Programming Language (the book is often referred to by the abbreviation TAPL). It explains the programming language AWK, which is part of the Unix operating system. The authors explain the birth of the one-liner paradigm with their daily work on early Unix machines:
The 1977 version had only a few built-in variables and predefined functions. It was designed for writing short programs [...] Our model was that an invocation would be one or two lines long, typed in and used immediately. Defaults were chosen to match this style [...] We, being the authors, knew how the language was supposed to be used, and so we only wrote one-liners.
Official source
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