I was actually racking my brain for 'starts with a, ends in y, same length' words to make this dumb joke but then I remembered that /usr/share/dict has _huge_ flat-file lists of words of many languages in it, so I could just get them from that?

Ninety seconds of grep, awk and sort later, there it is. For future reference there's 223 of them, alphabetically going from abdominoscopy to axiomatically.

Y'all these computers have so much in them already. _So much_. But nobody knows.

@mhoye 10 seconds of using a dictionary: https://www.onelook.com/?w=a???????????y&ssbp=1

However, being able to code this yourself so quickly is a very useful skill. The moment you have a query that isn't covered by an existing tool, you can probably do it in 10 to 30 extra seconds, whereas I'd spend at least 10 minutes on getting a first test version of the scrip running. In that light, solving it with programming is worth it just to practice that skill — consider me motivated to try that more often 😺.

@nexvie

> time grep "^a..........y$" words

real 0m0.076s
user 0m0.062s
sys 0m0.014s

A 150x improvement on your search, and your search is including incorrect results like "atlantic city" and "ash wednesday".