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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 22 2017, @07:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the ABBA++ dept.

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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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday November 22 2017, @10:56PM (2 children)

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Wednesday November 22 2017, @10:56PM (#600401) Homepage

    No, not exactly like it, because Excel doesn't behave differently when you use a documented command at a certain time of day.

    But, since you mentioned it:

    Microsoft formally stopped including Easter eggs in its programs as part of its Trustworthy Computing Initiative in 2002

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @01:42PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @01:42PM (#600649)

    Emphasis by me:

    No, not exactly like it, because Excel doesn't behave differently when you use a documented command at a certain time of day.

    Nor does man.

    • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 23 2017, @06:12PM

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Thursday November 23 2017, @06:12PM (#600742) Homepage

      -w or --path
                  Don’t actually display the man pages, but do print the loca-
                  tion(s) of the files that would be formatted or displayed. If no
                  argument is given: display (on stdout) the list of directories
                  that is searched by man for man pages.
      If manpath is a link to
                  man, then "manpath" is equivalent to "man --path".

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk