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Spotted at Lobsters is a thread about a stackoverflow question on man; why does running "man -w" report "gimme gimme gimme" when run at 00:30?
This gets this response:
Pretty much the whole story is in the commit. The maintainer of man is a good friend of mine, and one day six years ago I jokingly said to him that if you invoke man after midnight it should print "gimme gimme gimme", because of the Abba song called "Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight":
Well, he did actually put it in. A few people were amused to discover it, and we mostly forgot about it until today.
The commit in question, and more commentary over at HackerNews.
Anyone know of other good easter eggs that have cropped up unexpectedly and caught users out?
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Why "man -w" will Sometimes Print "gimme gimme gimme"
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Croll's Query:
If tin whistles are made of tin, what are foghorns made of?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Wednesday November 22 2017, @10:31PM (4 children)
Many professional products contain easter eggs and other humor. In the case of mathematics textbooks, it well predates computers.
I recall Corel Draw (for Windows) had an easter egg where you could control the burner on a little hot air balloon with the mouse button.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday November 22 2017, @11:00PM (3 children)
An easter egg shouldn't hijack a documented switch at a certain time of day. And "everyone else does it" isn't a great excuse, anyway. Microsoft saw fit to ban them in the name of "Trustworthy Computing."
Lovely. Not so lovely if undocumented/unexpected code turns out have an exploitable bug in it, of course.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @08:48AM (1 child)
Apparently the documented behavior of that switch is to print "missing argument" - though that never actually worked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @09:43AM
man -w
/usr/local/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man
And this is what the documentation says it is supposed to do:
-w, --where, --path, --location
Don't actually display the manual pages, but do print the loca‐
tion(s) of the source nroff files that would be formatted.
It doesn't say it's supposed to output "gimme gimme gimme" when run sometime after midnight.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday November 23 2017, @11:36PM
I fail to see the harm. It does perform it's documented behavior. The funny output is on stderr, so an automated script won't trip over it. It doesn't mess with the return code.