Find all combinations of a given set of numbers

Question

say I have a set of numbers \'0\', \'1\', \'2\', ..., \'9\'. I want to find all numbers that contain exactly one of each of the numbers in my set.

The problem is: Be

Answer 1

To examine all the combinations without knowing in advance how many digits must have the output, I once wrote this code:

#include 
#include 

#define ARRSIZE(arr)    (sizeof(arr)/sizeof(*(arr)))

int main()
{
    const char values[]= {'0','1','2','3','4','5','6','7','8','9','a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h','i','j','k','l','m','n','o','p','q','r','s','t','u','v','w','x','y','z'};
    char * buffer=NULL;
    int * stack=NULL;
    int combinationLength=-1;
    int valuesNumber=-1;
    int curPos=0;
    fprintf(stderr, "%s", "Length of a combination: ");
    if(scanf("%d", &combinationLength)!=1 || combinationLength<1)
    {
        fputs("Invalid value.\n",stderr);
        return 1;
    }
    fprintf(stderr, "%s (%lu max): ", "Possible digit values",(long unsigned)ARRSIZE(values));
    if(scanf("%d", &valuesNumber)!=1 || valuesNumber<1 || (size_t)valuesNumber>ARRSIZE(values))
    {
        fputs("Invalid value.\n", stderr);
        return 1;
    }
    buffer=(char *)malloc(combinationLength);
    stack=(int *)malloc(combinationLength*sizeof(*stack));
    if(buffer==NULL || stack==NULL)
    {
        fputs("Cannot allocate memory.\n", stderr);
        free(buffer);
        free(stack);
        return 2;
    }
    /* Combinations generator */
    for(;;)
    {
        /* If we reached the last digit symbol... */
        if(stack[curPos]==valuesNumber)
        {
            /* ...get back to the previous position, if we finished exit */
            if(--curPos==-1)
                break;
            /* Repeat this check */
            continue;
        }
        buffer[curPos]=values[stack[curPos]];
        /* If we are in the most inner fake-cycle write the combination */
        if(curPos==combinationLength-1)
            puts(buffer);
        stack[curPos]++;
        /* If we aren't on the last position, start working on the next one */
        if(curPos

It does everything just in one cycle to avoid recursion and function calls overhead, still if "fakes" the needed nested for loops using the stack array.
It performs quite well, on my 4 years old Athlon64 3800+ it takes 2' 4" of user time (=> actual computation time) to generate 36^6=2176782336 combinations, so it computes about 17.5 million combinations per second.

matteo@teoubuntu:~/cpp$ gcc -Wall -Wextra -ansi -pedantic -O3 combinations.c -o combinations.x
matteo@teoubuntu:~/cpp$ time ./combinations.x > /media/Dati/combinations.txt
Length of a combination: 6
Possible digit values (36 max): 36

real    13m6.685s
user    2m3.900s
sys 0m53.930s
matteo@teoubuntu:~/cpp$ head /media/Dati/combinations.txt
000000
000001
000002
000003
000004
000005
000006
000007
000008
000009
matteo@teoubuntu:~/cpp$ tail /media/Dati/combinations.txt
zzzzzq
zzzzzr
zzzzzs
zzzzzt
zzzzzu
zzzzzv
zzzzzw
zzzzzx
zzzzzy
zzzzzz
matteo@teoubuntu:~/cpp$ ls -lh /media/Dati/combinations.txt 
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15G 2010-01-02 14:16 /media/Dati/combinations.txt
matteo@teoubuntu:~/cpp$ 

The "real" time is quite high because I was also doing something else on the PC in the meanwhile.