tunafish


tunafish

(humour, operating system)In hackish lore, refers to themutated punchline of an age-old joke to be found at the bottomof the manual pages of "tunefs(8)" in the original 4.2BSDdistribution. The joke was removed in later releases oncecommercial sites started using 4.2. Tunefs relates to the"tuning" of file-system parameters for optimum performance,and at the bottom of a few pages of wizardly inscriptions wasa "BUGS" section consisting of the line "You can tune a filesystem, but you can't tunafish". Variants of this can be seenin other BSD versions, though it has been excised from someversions by humourless management droids. The [nt]roff sourcefor SunOS 4.1.1 contains a comment apparently designed toprevent this: "Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog yoursteps from now until the "time_t's wrap around."