HPR4763: Solving anagrams with bash

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. The Dutch Railway Company occasionally has a anagram of the names of the railway stations on their services. The image above shows which service we are on, namely the intercity direct to Breda via Schiphol Airport , and the time is 07:27. It shows a cartoon depiction of a platform where the information sign is displaying the letters of the anagram, and today it reads "Nul Te Teer". Under it says "Oops, the letters are mixed up. Can you guess the correct station ?" The under it says that the next station at 07:38 will be Duivendrecht . I wrote a script to check my guess. It consists of a function normalise_word, which takes any word, removes everything but the letters, and then converts it to lower case. Each letter is printed to it's own line, where it's sorted, and new lines are removed, to be printed as a "normalised" word. This is used to take the List of Dutch Railway Stations from Wikipedia , to produce a list of stations and convert them to normalized names which is saved to a new file with the normalised names on the same line as the real names. We can then just grep for the normalised version of the anagram and whatever line it was found in the normalised file, should correspond to the same line in the real file. "Nul Te Teer" gets converted to "eeelnrttu" which is found in the normalised file, and that corresponds to " Etten-Leur " Tell us how would you solve it ? #!/bin/bash # Ken Fallon - CC-0/Public Domain station_file="ns-train-stations.txt" # Get the station name if [ "$#" -lt 1 ] then echo "ERROR: Please specify station" exit 1 fi function normalise_word() { printf '%sn' "${1}" | tr --delete --complement 'A-Za-zn' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | grep --only-matching --regexp='.' | sort --ignore-case | tr --delete 'n' printf 'n' } station="$( normalise_word "${1}" )" cat ${station_file} | while read word do normalise_word "${word}" done > "${station_file%.*}_normalised.txt" linenumber="$( grep --line-number --perl-regexp "^${station}$" "${station_file%.*}_normalised.txt" | awk -F ':' '{print $1}' )" sed --quiet "${linenumber}p" ${station_file} Provide feedback on this episode .

November 4, 2026Duration unavailable

Episode summary

Host Ken Fallon explains how he developed a Bash script to solve anagram puzzles featuring station names from the national train company in the Netherlands. The method involves normalizing strings by stripping non-alphabetic characters, sorting letters, and cross-referencing against a pre-normalized reference file.

Takeaway 1The project was inspired by word teasers posted on boards at Dutch railway stations for passenger entertainment.

Takeaway 2A key part of solving anagrams involves normalizing words by removing spaces, brackets, and non-letter symbols.

Takeaway 3The normalization process converts letters to lowercase and sorts them alphabetically to create a standard signature for any word.

Takeaway 4To identify an anagram, the script compares the sorted signature of the scrambled word against a pre-processed list of station names.

Takeaway 5Common Linux command-line utilities like TR, SORT, GREP, and SED are used to handle the string manipulations.

Follow the conversation

Introduction to Hacker Public Radio

Ken Fallon introduces episode 4763 of Hacker Public Radio, noting its place in the reserve queue for days with schedule gaps.

The Dutch Railway Anagram Challenge

Ken describes the motivation behind the script: solving station name anagrams provided by the main train company in the Netherlands.

Developing a Solution in Bash

The host discusses writing a quick Bash script to verify his guesses for family chat puzzles, despite the code being rough and ready.

Data Normalization Strategy

The method involves stripping non-letter characters and spaces from station names to create a consistent format for comparison.

The Normalization Function Explained

A detailed technical breakdown of the function that sorts lowercase letters to generate a normalized word signature.

Cross-Referencing and Output

The script iterates through a station file, finds the matching normalized line number, and uses SED to retrieve the original station name.

Call for Listener Submissions

Ken concludes the show by encouraging listeners to submit their own alternative solutions to Hacker Public Radio.

Read the episode

Adapted from “HPR4763: Solving anagrams with bash” by Hacker Public Radio, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This transcript was generated by speech recognition and the summary and chapters by AI, so they can contain errors. BestPodcast is not affiliated with the creator. These adaptations are available under the same license.

This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4763 for Wednesday the 4th of November 2026. Today's show is entitled "Solving Anagrams with Bash". It is hosted by Ken Fallon and is about 7 minutes long. It carries a clean flag. The summary is Ken writes a Bash script to solve the Dutch Railway Station anagram challenge.

You are listening to a show from the reserve queue. This show was submitted in February 2026 to cover occasions like this where there are gaps in the schedule. There are now 11 reserve shows left. Hi everybody. My name is Ken Fallon. You're listening to uh another episode from Hacker Public Radio. I'm chucking this one into the reserve queue because I don't think it's very timely or that critical that it gets out there. So on the days we have free slots, you're going to be hearing this.

If you do want to record for a show for Hacker Public Radio, you have the option of selecting a particular day. Or if you don't care about when the episode gets released, we really appreciate it if you put a show uh into the reserve queue so that uh they can come out when uh some of the free slots that we had left open for new hosts were not filled. Today I want to talk to you about a little script I wrote to do some um anagram solving on the National Spoor which is the main train company in the Netherlands.

Occasionally they put little teasers up where they mix up the station names and they put them on a little board for people to entertain themselves in the morning on the way into the work. It's just a nice thing to do. Um uh and as my two members of my immediate family are involved in the NS occasionally I and we travel quite a lot with the with the trains, we get these puzzles sent to us in the family chat. So naturally I wanted to check if my correct guess was correct before uh I sent it.