--- title: Self-Printing Machine Code | daily.dev description: A self-printing machine code program that writes itself to standard output when executed in a DOS environment. It can be tested in a Unix/Linux system with... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/self-printing-machine-code-ouf1usrqi twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Self-Printing Machine Code | daily.dev og:description: A self-printing machine code program that writes itself to standard output when executed in a DOS environment. It can be tested in a Unix/Linux system with... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/self-printing-machine-code-ouf1usrqi og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/OUf1uSRQI.png og:image:alt: Self-Printing Machine Code og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Self-Printing Machine Code **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 19 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A self-printing machine code program that writes itself to standard output when executed in a DOS environment. It can be tested in a Unix/Linux system with DOSBox or in an actual MS-DOS 6.22 system or Windows 98 system. The program uses x86 machine code and DOS services to write its own bytes. There is a discussion on the definition of a quine and the differences between machine code quines and other quines. The program can also be modified to avoid reading its own bytes and still print itself. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. 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