Mailing List Archive

Support open source code!


[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

UNIX Humor



Hi all,

I found this on the net. Enjoy!

=========================================================

        Unix was a program gone bad. Born into poverty, its parents, the
phone company, couldn't afford more than a roll of teletype paper a year,
so Unix never had a decent documentation and its source files had to go
without comments whatsoever. Year after year, Papa Bell would humiliate
itself asking for rate increases so that it could feed its child. Still,
Unix had to go to school with only two and three letter command names
because the phone company just couldn't afford any better. At school, the
other operating systems with real command names, and even command
completion, would taunt poor little Unix for not having any job or terminal
management facilities or for having to use its file system for interprocess
comunication and locking.

        Then, bitter and enmasculated by its poverty, the phone company
began to drink. During lost weekends of drunken excess, it would brutally
beat poor little Unix about the face and neck. Eventually, Unix ran away
from home. Soon it was living on the streets of Berkeley. There, Unix got
involved with a bad crowd. Its life became a degrading journey of drugs
and debauchery. To keep itself alive, it sold cheap source licenses for
itself to universities which used it for medical experiments. Being wantonly
hacked by and endless stream of nameless, faceless undergraduates, both
men and women, often by more than one at the same time, Unix fell into a
hell-hole of depravity.

        And so it was that poor little Unix began to go insane. It
retreated steadily into a dreamworld, the only place where it felt safe.
It took heroin and dreamed of being a real operating system. It took LSD
and dreamed of being a raspberry flavored three-toed yak. It liked thta
better. As Unix became increasingly attracted to LSD, it would spend
weekends reading Hunter Thompson and taking cocktails of acid and speed
while writing crazed poetry in which it found deep meaning but which no
one else could understand:

   $sed <$mf >$mf.new -e '1,/^# AUTOMATICALLY/!d'

   make shlist || ($echo "Searching for .SH files..."; \
      $echo *.SH | $tr ' ' '\012' | $egrep -v '\*' >.shlist)
   if $test -s .deptmp; then
      for file in `cat .shlist`; do
         $echo `$expr X$file : 'X\(.*\).SH'`: $file config.sh \; \
            /bin/sh $file >> .deptmp
      done
      $echo "Updating $mf..."
      $echo "# If this runs make out of memory, delete /usr/include lines." \
         >> $mf.new
      $sed 's|^\(.*\.o:\) *\(.*/.*\.c\) *$|\1 \2; '"$defrule \2|" .deptmp \
         >> $mf.new
   else
      make hlist || (($echo "Searching for .h files..."; \
         $echo *.h | $tr ' ' '\012' | $egrep -v '\*' >.hlist)
      $echo "You don't seem to have a proper C preprocessor. Using grep \
         instead."
      $egrep '^#include ' `cat .clist` `cat ,hlist` >.deptmp
      $echo "Updating $mf..."
      <.clist $sed -n                                                   \
         -e '/\//{'                                                     \
         -e   's|^\(.*\)/\(.*\)\.c|\2.0: \1/\2.c; '"$defrule \1/\2.c|p" \
         -e d                                                           \
         -e '}'                                                         \
         -e 's|^\(.*\)\.c|\1.o: \1.c|p' >> $mf.new
      <.hlist $sed -n 's|\(.*/\)\(.*\)|s= \2= \1\2=|p' >.hsed
      <.deptmp $sed -n 's|c:#include "\(.*\).*$|o: \1|p' | \
         $sed 's|^[^;]*/||' | \
         $sed -f .hsed >> $mf.new
      <.deptmp $sed -n 's|c:#include <\(.*\)>.*$|o: /usr/include/\1|p'  \
         >> $mf.new
      <.deptmp $sed -n 's|h:#include "\(.*\)".*$|h: \1|p' | \
         $sed -f .hsed >> $mf.new
      <.deptmp $sed -n 's|h:#include <\(.*\)>.*$|h: /usr/include/\1|p'  \
         >> $mf.new
      for file in `$cat .shlist`; do
         $echo '$expr X$file " 'X\(.*\).SH'`: $file config.sh \;  \
            /bin/sh $file >> $mf.new
      done
   fi


        Eventually, Unix began walking down Telegraph Avenue talking to
itself, saying: "Panic: freeing free inode," over and over again. Sometimes
it would accosting perfect strangers and yell "Bus error (core dumped)!" or
"UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN FSCK MANUALLY!" at them in high pitched squeal
like a chihuahua with amphetamine psychosis. Upstanding citizens pretended it
was invisible. Mothers with children crossed to the other side of the street.

        Then one evening Unix watched television, an event which would change
its life. There it discovered professional wrestling and knew that it had
found its true calling. It began to take huge doses of corticosteroids to
build itself up even bigger than the biggest of the programs which had beaten
it up as a child. It ate three dozen pancackes and four dozen new features for
breakfast each day. As the complications of the steroids grew worse, its
internal organs grew to the point where Unix could no longer contain them.
First the kernel grew, then the C library, then the number of daemons. Soon
one of its window system was requiring two megabytes of swap space for each
open window. Unix began to bulge in strange, unflattering places. But Unix
continued to take drugs and its internal organs continued to grow. They grew
out its ears and nostrills. They placed incredible stresses on Unix's brain
until it finally liquefied under pressure. Soon Unix had the mass of Andre
the Giant, the body of the Elephant Man, and the mind of a forgotten Jack
Nicholson character.

        The worst strain was on Unix's mind. Unable to assimilate all the
conflicting patchworks of features it had ingested, its personality began
to fragment into millions of distinct, incompatible operating systems. People
would cautiously say "good morning Unix. And who are we today?" and it would
reply "Beastie" (BSD), or "Domain", or "I'm System III, but I'll be System V
tomorrow." Psychatrists labored for years to weld together the major poles of
Unix's personality, "Beasty Boy", an inner-city youth from Berkeley, and
"Belle", a southern transvestite whi wanted to be a woman. With each attempt,
the two poles would mutate, like psychotic retroviruses, leaving their union
a worthless blob of protoplasm requiring constant life support remain
compatible with its parent personalities.

        Finally, unbalanced by its own cancerous growth, Unix fell into a vat
of toxic radioactive wombat urine, from it emerged, skin white and hair green.
It smelled like somebody's dead grandmother. With a horrible grin on its face,
it set out to conquer the world.

     



Home | Main Index | Thread Index

Home Page Mailing List Linux and Japan TLUG Members Links