Consider also what including a file means. Ok, so you read from a file on the filesystem, but what about custom filesystems? I played around with this idea a w

Consider also what including a file means. Ok, so you read from a file on the filesystem, but what about custom filesystems? I played around with this idea a while ago and build a user space filesystem that executes the file names with the shell [0] (it needs a bit of a custom syntax to express characters that aren't allowed in filenames) $ ./execfs mnt # or make mount $ cat 'mnt/(uname)' Linux $ cat "mnt/unique text(seq 10 | awk '{c+=\$1}END{print(c)}')unique text" 55 $ fusermount -u mnt # or make umount This allows you to basically do anything you want at compiletime with any C compiler: $ cat examples.h char seed[8] = { #include "mnt/(head -c 8 /dev/urandom | xxd -i)" }; double pi_squared = #include "mnt/(python -c @;import math;print(math.pi * math.pi);@;)" ; char *kernel = #include "mnt/(uname -sr | sed @,s/^/@;/;s/$/@;/@,)" ; $ cpp -w -P examples.h char seed[8] = { 0xf9, 0x17, 0x93, 0x83, 0xf6, 0x90, 0xca, 0xa7 }; double pi_squared = 9.86960440109 ; char *kernel = "Linux 5.16.0-1-amd64" ; [0] http://github.com/camel-cdr/execfs http://github.com/camel-cdr/execfs