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Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

How is this possible? I can't even produce "Hello World" program as short as that, do you not use ELF format?

LOL this reminds of old flame wars on Usenet about the smallest possible "Hello World!".

Someone would always eventually post "echo Hello World!" and the endless arguments would ensue about whether or not that was actually a program.

Why echo it?

    $ cat /tmp/hello 
    hello\ world
    $ /tmp/hello
    /tmp/hello: line 1: hello world: command not found

It prints hello world :-)

Great idea! I improved the "program":

  $ cat >hello
  Hello\ World\!
  $ chmod +x hello
  $ ./hello
  ./hello: line 1: Hello World!: command not found

V0.2 changelog:

* fix: adheres to Hello World! standard now

In realmode DOS COM format (flat binary) a "Hello world" is under two dozen bytes, the bulk of it being the string itself.