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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.
Two is not equal to three, even for large values of two.
(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.