exercism/bash/atbash-cipher/README.md

Atbash Cipher

Create an implementation of the atbash cipher, an ancient encryption system created in the Middle East.

The Atbash cipher is a simple substitution cipher that relies on transposing all the letters in the alphabet such that the resulting alphabet is backwards. The first letter is replaced with the last letter, the second with the second-last, and so on.

An Atbash cipher for the Latin alphabet would be as follows:

Plain:  abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Cipher: zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba

It is a very weak cipher because it only has one possible key, and it is a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher. However, this may not have been an issue in the cipher's time.

Ciphertext is written out in groups of fixed length, the traditional group size being 5 letters, and punctuation is excluded. This is to make it harder to guess things based on word boundaries.

Examples

• Encoding test gives gvhg
• Decoding gvhg gives test
• Decoding gsvjf rxpyi ldmul cqfnk hlevi gsvoz abwlt gives thequickbrownfoxjumpsoverthelazydog

Run the tests with:

bats atbash_cipher_test.sh

After the first test(s) pass, continue by commenting out or removing the [[ $BATS_RUN_SKIPPED == true ]] || skip annotations prepending other tests.

To run all tests, including the ones with skip annotations, run:

BATS_RUN_SKIPPED=true bats atbash_cipher_test.sh

Source

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atbash

External utilities

Bash is a language to write "scripts" -- programs that can call external tools, such as sed, awk, date and even programs written in other programming languages, like Python. This track does not restrict the usage of these utilities, and as long as your solution is portable between systems and does not require installation of third party applications, feel free to use them to solve the exercise.

For an extra challenge, if you would like to have a better understanding of the language, try to re-implement the solution in pure Bash, without using any external tools. Note that there are some types of problems that bash cannot solve, such as performing floating point arithmetic and manipulating dates: for those, you must call out to an external tool.

Submitting Incomplete Solutions

It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.