Instead of writing your own scripts, perhaps you can try http://md5deep.sourceforge.net/

Be sure to use if=/dev/zero instead because if=/dev/null will not produce any output to overwrite your MBR :)

And a nice description of his story on Damn Interesting: http://www.damninteresting.com/free-fall-from-near-space/

As it turns out, these three dutch guys (being from a particularly braindead party in the first place) voted incorrectly by mistake...

Just hold down the 'alt' key and you can drag the window, no need even to use the titlebar

Take a look at http://fort2.xdas.com/~kor/oss2jack/ and the timestamps on that page.. This is a very bad case of deja vu, the 'fusd' framework is currently unmaintained (cusd is probably nicer..) but it's been around for a couple of years already. And guess what, the author of the above page wrote a userspace OSS device that couples to JACK. This stuff already exists for years!

While I agree with the general spirit of your post, please allow me to introduce you to a magic function called 'asprintf'!

'man 3 asprintf' says:

"The functions asprintf() and vasprintf() are analogs of sprintf(3) and vsprintf(3), except that they allocate a string large enough to hold the
output including the terminating null byte, and return a pointer to it via the first parameter. This pointer should be passed to free(3) to
release the allocated storage when it is no longer needed."

So your very long example just became a bit shorter. Of course you need to check if the returned string != NULL (just in case there wasn't enough memory). You also gain all the nice formatting functions of printf (though "%s%s" will do nicely in your example).