1990 marked the "The Seventh International Obfuscated C Code Contest" Copyright (c) 1990, Landon Curt Noll & Larry Bassel. All Rights Reserved. Permission for personal, educational or non-profit use is granted provided this this copyright and notice are included in its entirety and remains unaltered. All other uses must receive prior permission in writing from both Landon Curt Noll and Larry Bassel. Instructions for use: Run make to compile entries (it is possible that on System V or non-unix systems the makefile needs to be changed). The ansi.mk may need to be changed if your ANSI C compiler is not gcc. Look at the source and try to figure out what the programs do, and run them with various inputs. If you want to, look at the hints files for (minor) spoilers. This year, the Grand Prize won a standing ovation at USENIX. The "Strangest abuse of the rules" award was given this year to stress the fact that starting in 1991, entries should be shell-specific. This year was the first year that we accepted ANSI C entries. It was interesting to note that the ANSI C entries were as a whole less portable than the K&R C entries. We hope that in future contests people will enter more obfuscated and challenging ANSI C programs. We would like to thank Barbara Frezza (loving wife of Larry Bassel) for her role as official chef of the contest. Her opinions regarding some of the contest entries were appreciated. Rules and results were posted to comp.lang.c, comp.sources.unix, and alt.sources. They have been made available on a wide number of Usenet archive sites such as uunet.