[TUHS] A man easter-egg (gimme gimme gimme)

George Michaelson ggm at algebras.org
Wed Nov 22 09:30:04 AEST 2017


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 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 1:03 PM, Edouard KLEIN <edouardklein at 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
>
>



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