Unix Error Messages (joke) | Hacker News Reader

Unix Error Messages (joke)

gnu.org

60 pointsMrXOR13 comments

Not a joke because it is intentional but I always found ssh's answer to an non-existent user hilarious:

    ssh user@host
    You don't exist, go away!

Raw material for further jokes:

    head -c4 AnyJava.class | xxd -p
    cafebabe

The more morbidly inclined AIX user might try this with tail on a coredump and will find deadbeef.

>ssh user@host >You don't exist, go away!

I have never seen that. I always get: "Permission denied" of some sort.

How to avoid this in your software (applies to CLI but also messaging in GUIs):

- Always wrap input, code, strings in some delimeters.

- Always specify the kind of a thing custom name refers to.

- Follow standard prose writing rules, like ending sentences with a period.

So:

File named "God" does not exist.

Missing `)` character.

While I was writing this mods took the submission down?

How many of these actually output what they say they output when run on a modern variant of UNIX?

Almost none. Early Unix uses a rather informal style to report errors, like those debug messages written by a casual programmer. Nowadays, at least the GNU toolchain uses a more rigorous style to report errors formally. BSD's messages are more concise, but still have more details.

e.g, compare

    %make love
    Make:  Don't know how to make love.  Stop.

and (shell doesn't matter here, GNU make matters)

    sh-4.4$ make love
    make: *** No rule to make target 'love'.  Stop.

There's still a funny one, though. In the old Unix, we had

    % ar m God
    ar: God does not exist

But now,

    $ ar m God
    ar: creating God

This still works:

    # whatis love
    love: nothing appropriate.

Quite a few if you run *BSD! This is on FreeBSD 12.0-STABLE (and use `csh` as noted in the first line). These still works:

    % "How poorly would you rate the Unix (so-called) user interface?
    Unmatched '"'.

    % ^How did the sex change^ operation go?
    Modifier failed.

    % If I had a ( for every $ Congress spent, what would I have?
    Too many ('s.

    % make love
    make: don't know how to make love. Stop

    % got a light?
    got: No match.

    % man: why did you get a divorce?
    man:: Too many arguments.

    % \(-
    (-: Command not found.

No longer works.

    % rm congressional-ethics
    rm: congressional-ethics: No such file or directory

    % ar m God
    ar: warning: God: no such file

    % [where is Jimmy Hoffa?
    [where: No match.

    % sleep with me
    usage: sleep seconds

    % ^What is saccharine?
    Modifier failed.

    % sh
    $ PATH=pretending! /usr/bin/which sense

    $ drink <bottle; opener
    sh: cannot open bottle: No such file or directory
    sh: opener: not found

    $ mkdir matter; cat >matter
    sh: cannot create matter: Is a directory

For a reference, csh in FreeBSD 12.0-STABLE is tcsh 6.20.00 from 2016[1]

[1]: https://github.com/tcsh-org/tcsh/blob/master/Announce-6.20.0...

> cannot create matter: Is a directory

Looks like sh is way ahead of the particle physicists on this one.

Reminders of the following joke (the most geekiest joke I ever saw):

chown -R us ./base

I accidentally gave

  $ ar m God

a try on bash:

  ar: creating God

That's at least more proactive compared to cshell's:

  ar: God does not exist

That's got nothing to do with bash vs csh, just with ancient ar vs. current ar. If you look in the pwd after your ar invocation, you will indeed see a file named God, and you will feel a bit weary as you

  rm God

There was a "being silly" package for error messages, I believe, but I can't recall where exactly. While software usually offers a debug feature, I really like the idea that software also can have a silly mode, or similar, like Easter eggs which are triggered by a specific date. It takes away the seriousness of using a computer and lightens up the mood. Also good for motivation and morale.

There was an old CD player called workbone that contributed to similar humor

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