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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: 5, Informative) by tekk on Thursday November 23 2017, @04:56AM

    by tekk (5704) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 23 2017, @04:56AM (#600523)

    Looking at the man page, using man -w without a man page isn't allowed, the entry for -w doesn't say that you're allowed to omit a page; basically it's undocumented behavior that people are relying on.

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