From: bobk@gibdo.engr.washington.edu (Bob)
Newsgroups: rec.humor.d
Subject: Re: WANTED: Stupid UNIX tricks, command line jokes
Date: 12 Oct 92 21:55:27 GMT
Article-I.D.: gibdo.1992Oct12.215059.4285
Organization: University of Washington


  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 <bottle; opener
  bottle: cannot open
  opener: not found
  
  $ mkdir matter; cat >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