NAME

caesar, rot13 — decrypt caesar ciphers

SYNOPSIS

caesar [rotation]

rot13

DESCRIPTION

The caesar utility attempts to decrypt caesar ciphers using English letter frequency statistics. Caesar reads from the standard input and writes to the standard output.

The optional numerical argument rotation may be used to specify a specific rotation value. If invoked as rot13, a rotation value of 13 will be used.

The frequency (from most common to least) of English letters is as follows:

ETAONRISHDLFCMUGPYWBVKXJQZ

Their frequencies as a percentage are as follows:

E(13), T(10.5), A(8.1), O(7.9), N(7.1), R(6.8), I(6.3), S(6.1), H(5.2), D(3.8), L(3.4), F(2.9), C(2.7), M(2.5), U(2.4), G(2), P(1.9), Y(1.9), W(1.5), B(1.4), V(.9), K(.4), X(.15), J(.13), Q(.11), Z(.07).

Rotated postings to USENET and some of the databases used by the fortune(6) program are rotated by 13 characters.