From rec.humor.d Tue Oct 13 16:15:45 1992 Path: news.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!darwin.sura.net!gatech!emory!ogicse!henson!news.u.washington.edu!gibdo!bobk From: bobk@gibdo.engr.washington.edu (Bob) Newsgroups: rec.humor.d Subject: Re: WANTED: Stupid UNIX tricks, command line jokes Message-ID: <1992Oct12.215059.4285@gibdo.engr.washington.edu> Date: 12 Oct 92 21:55:27 GMT Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: University of Washington Lines: 214 Note that the '%' prompt indicates the C shell, while the '$' prompt indicates the Bourne shell. Go ahead and try some ... $ ar x God ar: God does not exist $ cat "door: paws too slippery" cat: cannot open door: paws too slippery $ cat "food in tin cans" cat: cannot open food in tin cans $ lost lost: not found $ make love Make: Don't know how to make love. Stop. $ make war Make: Don't know how to make war. Stop. $ rm God rm: God nonexistent % gotta light? No match. % mkdir yellow_pages; cat > yellow_pages yellow_pages: Is a directory % !1984 1984: Event not found. # (on some systems) % rm meese-ethics rm: meese-ethics nonexistent % ar m God ar: God does not exist % "How would you rate Reagan's incompetence? Unmatched ". % [Where is Jimmy Hoffa? Missing ]. % ^How did the sex change^ operation go? Modifier failed. % If I had a ( for every $ Congress spent, what would I have? Too many ('s. % sleep with me bad character % got a light? No match. % man: why did you get a divorce? man:: Too many arguments. % ^What is saccharine? Bad substitute. % %blow %blow: No such job. % \(- (-: Command not found. % sh $ PATH=pretending! /usr/ucb/which sense no sense in pretending! $ drink matter matter: cannot create What -> >%touch me >%chmod 000 me >%touch me >touch: cannot touch me: permission denied Slightly enhanced version: % cd /tmp % touch this; chmod 000 this % ln -s /usr/bin/touch U % U this U: cannot touch this: no write permission $ ar x "my love life" ar: my love life does not exist $ ar x "matey, the treasure" ar: matey, the tresure does not exist $ talk Gorvachev@Kremlin talk: Kremlin: Can't figure out network address. $ talk Comrade Khruchev [Your party is not logged on] make "bottle open" make "heads or tails of all this" make love make mistake make sense man woman man -kisses dog == UNIX[*] System Laboratories (USL) announced today that they will shortly begin support for three-letter commands (tlc) in their operating system. The reason, according to spokespersons kt and dr, is the number of commands that have been added by various suppliers over the years. At the present rate of expansion, all possible command names (cn) in the traditional two-letter form will have been assigned by the end of next week, thus necessitating the new convention. Upon being reminded that most vendors have already suffered crises in their TLA naming schemes and have had to migrate to FLMN, the spokespeople replied as follows: Bah! Verbosity is for our parent company. If we run out of space again, segmentation fault (core dumped) [*] UNIX[**] is a trademark of UNIX[***] System Laboratories, Inc. [**] segmentation fault (core dumped) Response: This reminds me of a conversation I had a few years ago at a conference sponsored by the parent company of USL, with, I believe, the head of the user interface development group. Anyway, we were talking about the command-line interface issues, and the topic of intelligent or minimally- unique parsing came up. What follows is a paraphrase (my memory is a bit hazy): "Well, we're working on command consistancy, and one of the things we're trying to do is have command switches mean the same across commands. Unfortunately, even using upper and lower case, there aren't enough symbols in the alphabet. The group is currently deadlocked between those who want to use actual words, and those who feel that would be a gross violation of the "Spirit of UNIX"(tm). == COMPUTERWORLD 1 April CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following: "In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Denis had just finished reading 'Bored of the Rings', a hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax: for(;P("\n"),R=;P("|"))for(e=C;e=;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2); To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that has resulted from our silly prank so long ago." Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastely convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, merely stating 'VM will be available Real Soon Now'. In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct. In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating that a similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And IBM spokesmen have begun denying that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is an internal prank gone awry. == Bob Seattle, Washington