CAESAR(6)

💖 NAME 💖

okay bestie, gather round — this is the manual for caesar and rot13, the little duo whose whole job is decrypting caesar ciphers. That's it. That's the gig. 👑

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

caesar [rotation]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So here's the tea, fr fr: the caesar utility tries to decrypt caesar ciphers by using English letter frequency statistics. It's giving detective energy 🔍✨ — it reads from the standard input and writes to the standard output, no cap.

You can hand it a little something extra: the optional numerical argument rotation, which lets you specify a specific rotation value. Optional. A lil treat. 🎀

Now for the iconic part — the frequency of English letters, ranked from most common to least common, is literally this:

ETAONRISHDLFCMUGPYWBVKXJQZ

And their frequencies as a percentage? Obsessed with this data, honestly:

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).

Last thing, and this is the lore you need 🦋: rotated postings to USENET and some of the databases used by the fortune(6) program are rotated by 13 characters. iykyk 💅

And that's the whole page, bestie — mwah, no notes. This one shipped as part of the Debian manual set, dated November 16, 1993, and the man page itself answers to CAESAR(6) under the Games Manual section. 🫶 Stay decrypted out there. 💜