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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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Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
-- Mark Twain
(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.