On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 1:03 PM, Edouard KLEIN <edouardklein@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:


It is for example discussed here:

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:

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