Humorous Open Source Programmers

Some Linux stuff; CC-licensed of flickr by Andrew Lewine; source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewlevine/153752375/One thing I like about Open Source programs is that the programmers seem to have a little humor. This leads to things like the “insult” setting for sudo, which makes fun of you everytime you mistype the password. It’s interesting to get messages like

“Maybe you should use more than two fingers, next time!

when you happen to hit the Enter key too fast.

Or, today I realized that another command works quite flawlessly:

who mom loves

gives you information about… you. Who else would mom love? Interestingly the Mac OSX programmers don’t quite seem to have that kind of humor, so they just allow who am i, which also works on Linux.

Any other funny commands you guys know about?



Categories: OSU OSL Crosspost, Tech Talk

3 Responses to “Humorous Open Source Programmers”

  1. Way back when you used to be able to say
    cat can
    and would get the humorous message
    cat can’t open can
    But unfortunately, at some point the error message was made more precise but less amusing. Now it says
    cat: can: No such file or directory

  2. Ah, thanks for that comment. That’s a funny command too. I just tried it on OS X, and unfortunately they have the “new” message you were mentioning, too.

    Too bad!

  3. […] Update on the open source humor post: […]

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