22 Nov
2017
22 Nov
'17
12:30 a.m.
man woman
make love
cat "tin of catfood"
the first two were easter eggs. the last one was just assonance from
"cannot open" error message.
I think they were always tolerated.
But.. then not. The ADA compiler verification committee made York take
"congratulations, you have just invoked the most abstruse element of
the ADA specification"
out of the compiler messages section: it was tickling the test harness
and didn't meet compliance (or so I was told)
On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 7:07 AM, Charles Anthony
<charles.unix.pro(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 1:03 PM, Edouard KLEIN <edouardklein(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi all,
An easter-egg in the version of man that is installed on the most popular
Linux distros has recently been discovered after being there for 6 years:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gi…
It is for example discussed here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747313
It makes man print 'gimme gimme gimme' if called at "Half past
twelve", as
in the ABBA song.
I check on BSD, but man seems to be a shell script on FreeBSD, so it's
immune from the easter egg:
https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/usr.bin/man/man.sh
Do you have any UNIX easter-egg stories ? Putting some in, or discovering
one...
Was this kind of humor tolerated in the professional settings where UNIX
first circulated, or was it frowned upon ?
I remember back in the late 90's, the man page for syslogd had a section
about dealing with network attacks on syslogd servers; several approaches
described, the last one reading something like
....if all else fails, find a three for length of
sucker rod* and have a
discussion with the user.
*Sucker rod: 3/4 threaded steel rod, used in oil drilling.
It looks like someone edited it out of the man pages since then.
-- Charles