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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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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @09:26AM (9 children)
In contrast stuff like the Excel flight simulator was unlikely to be triggered by accident when using features as documented.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @09:44AM (3 children)
No, man -w didn't stop working as documented.
Using man -w [pagename] continued to work exactly the same as before.
Using man -w without a pagename didn't stop working as documented either, because that would imply that before it would have worked as documented, which in turn would imply that this usage had been documented at all. As a general rule, undocumented behaviour may change at any time.
Here's an excerpt of the man page of man:
Note that all forms using the -w option have a non-optional argument.
Also note that there's no documentation of what error messages it may spit out; since "gimme gimme gimme" was output on stderr, it was a (admittedly not very instructive) error message. And it does spit out error messages other than "gimme gimme gimme"; those error messages are unspecified (and also locale dependent by the way). And while I'm too lazy to search through the repository, I would bet that some error messages changed over time.
So no, man -w didn't stop working as documented.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 23 2017, @06:10PM (1 child)
That's not what my man says:
-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
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday November 24 2017, @07:22AM
Well, what actually matters is what the man which contained the Easter egg says. Elsethread I've quoted that, directly from the repository. It doesn't allow -w without argument.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 23 2017, @06:26PM
Further to my previous comment: what you've quoted there is from a version of man somewhere between 7 and 16 years old.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday November 23 2017, @10:17AM (4 children)
Did not.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 23 2017, @06:21PM (3 children)
Did too.
-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
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 23 2017, @06:56PM (2 children)
That's not what it says on my system:
Checked on 3 different versions of Linux (all Debian/Ubuntu based, though).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 23 2017, @07:09PM (1 child)
Well, I now decided to look in the source: [nongnu.org]
Note that this is from the very repository in which the Easter egg was added.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @10:05PM
Things are a bit confusing because there are at least two different implementations of man in common use today on GNU/Linux systems.
The subject of this article is man-db [nongnu.org], a reimplementation of the older "man" (whose website has been down for some time now but it is archived here [archive.org] -- I'm not sure if anyone has taken over from this)
There are several differences, including (apparently) the documentation of the -w option. The part quoted by wonkey_money is from the classic "man" version.