22 Nov
2017
22 Nov
'17
12:07 a.m.
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-gimme-gimme-at-0030
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