Set Operations in the Unix Shell

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alpha Permalink
October 14, 2008, 08:16

I mostly remember it being unpleasant, and hoped I’d find something more modern and elegant here :-)

Easiest way to do is to observe that for a set of size N, each element in the power set corresponds to a binary vector of length N. For example, for a set of size 3 with elements {A,B,C}

000 --> {}
001 --> {A}
010 --> {B}
...
111 --> {A,B,C}

So to enumerate the elements of a power set, just iterate over the 2^N possible values of a binary vector of length N.

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