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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: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 23 2017, @06:24PM (4 children)

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Thursday November 23 2017, @06:24PM (#600751) Homepage

    The documentation you land on if you Google "man man page" might only specify -w with an argument, but that page is 7 years old.

    -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
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday November 23 2017, @06:43PM (3 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Thursday November 23 2017, @06:43PM (#600759) Journal
    OK, assuming you're right, the timeline is that this was completely consistent with the documentation until the documentation was changed in error.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @10:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @10:09PM (#600849)

      The quoted snippet above is from the manual of the classic "man" package, not from "man-db" which is the subject of this article. In classic "man" the -w option is clearly documented to work without any additional arguments.

      Completely pointless incompatibilities between the two implementations is probably not a desirable scenario for anyone.

    • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 23 2017, @10:44PM (1 child)

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Thursday November 23 2017, @10:44PM (#600859) Homepage

      Why do you assume the documentation was changed in error? Can't it have been a deliberate change to the functionality of the program?

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk
      • (Score: 2) by Arik on Friday November 24 2017, @04:19AM

        by Arik (4543) on Friday November 24 2017, @04:19AM (#600921) Journal
        Actually reading it again I take that back, I was wrong.

        It's actually consistent with the documentation you quoted, regardless of when it was changed, they're still consistent.

        This is because the doc specifies the output to stdout, and that's exactly what you get on stdout.

        The 'easter egg' doesn't print to stdout, it prints to stderr.
        --
        If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?