Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30?

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030

by isp • 9 years ago

560 159 9 years ago

unix.stackexchange.com

isp• 9 years ago

Demonstration from https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...

    $ faketime '00:29:00' man
    What manual page do you want?

    $ faketime '00:30:00' man
    gimme gimme gimme
    What manual page do you want?

marchenko2• 9 years ago

I bet it is a reference to the ABBA song "Gimme Gimme Gimme (a man after midnight)"

Edit: I see that is the explanation given on StackOverflow. This is probably the fewest bits needed to encode a widely-distributed earworm.

wiredearp• 9 years ago

One could speculate further and propose that it refers to Narada Michael Walden's "Gimme Gimme Gimme" from 1985: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUzQv71iVeU.

reificator5• 9 years ago

This is probably the fewest bits needed to encode a widely-distributed earworm.

someBODY

Noughmad• 9 years ago

I recently wrote a tool that worked on bodies of text in Rust. Had multiple instances of

    if let Some(body) = ...

arkades• 9 years ago

...once told me...

Damn it, I can hear it in my head!

majewsky2• 9 years ago

Can someone explain this, please?

Kliment• 9 years ago

Even sticking to ABBA, "Waterloo!" is fewer bits and triggers an earworm just as well, but of course waterloo is not a man after midnight.

marchenko2• 9 years ago

Part of the challenge is finding some plausible reason to have the string come up in the context of operating a Unix system.

Maybe Rihanna will come out with a song called "Grep". Heck, maybe the Black-Eyed Peas already did...

chatmasta• 9 years ago

Here's a list of some other Linux easter eggs: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/top-10-linu...

vadimberman• 9 years ago

As an old fart who grew up with 1970s and 1980s music, I didn't even have to read the Stackexchange article to know the answer.

jgrahamc• 9 years ago

Me neither. I immediately thought "gimme, gimme, gimme" and "00:30 is after midnight" so clearly the answer is somehow Abba.

nouveau02• 9 years ago

It's 00:30 and not 00:01 for example because she says "Half past twelve" at the beginning of the song :) (Also, it sounds like Half-assed whale :D)

AdmiralAsshat• 9 years ago

My mind went to the Black Flag song, so the reference was lost on me.

_jal2• 9 years ago

Same here. "Don't ask what for..."

And I think we have a test case for probing programmer cultural heritage.

Corrado• 9 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wCK6INQcHs

interfixus• 9 years ago

Completely off on a tangent: A good friend of mine, getting on in years, just this weekend told me a story about the time he met one half of the composer-team behind that song, Benny Andersson of ABBA, at the absolute height of his fame somewhere in the mid to late seventies. Pleasant and low-key, almost self-effacing, superstardom or not. Someone tried to pull a fast one on him, and my friend, in a professional capacity, had to intercede. "Nah, let it be", said Benny in a very quiet Swedish way, "I can probably afford it".

bluesmoon2• 9 years ago

Benny owns the Rival Hotel in Stockholm. They mainly play ABBA music in the lounge. I spoke at the Stockholm webperf meetup a few years ago and the organisers put me up at this hotel (side story about how flying from Munich to Boston via a night in Stockholm saved me $400 in airfare). It was a really nice, modern hotel, very comfortable, and stylish, and of course, for a 70s/80s kid, the music was great.

snvzz• 9 years ago

This is a bug and should be fixed.

seba_dos1• 9 years ago

Already fixed: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=84bd...

krisives• 9 years ago

That was a fast hard fork... oh wait

koolba• 9 years ago

Barring an RFC or spec to code against, I'd say it's a feature that would need to be replicated.

em3rgent0rdr2• 9 years ago

Easter eggs remind us we're human and bring us joy when we least suspect and might need it the most.

Obviously don't want easter eggs in things like security code.

waffle_ss• 9 years ago

How much joy do you think the SO questioner had when their CI was breaking at (seemingly) random times of the day due to this idiotic flourish?

Sean1708• 9 years ago

It can be fixed without getting rid of the easter egg (which is exactly what was done: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=84bd...).

212• 9 years ago

There are 1000 packages on my Ubuntu. Imagine each one of those having an easter egg on a random day of the year.

Each one by itself maybe is cute and "makes you feel human", but not the aggregate behavior.

gpmcadam• 9 years ago

Or a feature that needs adding to the specification ;)

falcolas• 9 years ago

I was once tasked with fixing a bug around an easter egg - but it was because the easter egg stopped working.

Search for more cowbell (in a search field that's geared towards finding installs of an app), get a gif with more cowbell.

Sometimes, it's the little things that matter, that make you smile when you're in the middle of a crisis. I think the world needs more of these instead of less.

Angostura• 9 years ago

It's an important feature and should be documented.

There's probably someone somewhere using this as part of a mission-critical timing proceedure.

pm215• 9 years ago

Note in particular the comment from the man-db maintainer: "Oops! It was never meant to affect non-error cases" -- and this upstream commit https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=84bd... makes sure the easter egg doesn't affect real use cases.

exikyut• 9 years ago

1. I really really like how they kept the easter egg in by figuring out how to permanently sweep it out of the way. I can imagine some environments that would stumble on something like this and tensely rm -rf the whole thing with forced smiles.

2. "print_where" is set by the option parsing code when it sees "-w". https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/tree/src/man.c?...

mjw1007• 9 years ago

I think the impressive thing here is how quickly both upstream and the distros have fixed this once the problem was reported (even though the report was via an unofficial channel).

misnome• 9 years ago

Perhaps it makes me a killjoy, but generally if I see things like this in our codebase I think "Great! I get to remove code today!"

mmjaa2• 9 years ago

That would be an appropriate response if you're reviewing newly-checked in code from junior developers, but this has been there for years and if you remove it, you're probably going to break things downstream .. there'd literally be nobody there to hear your prayer.

mercer• 9 years ago

I'm curious... how would you imagine this might break things downstream?

FWIW I love this kind of stuff and if properly documented would rather work around it than remove it, but nobody relies on my code so what do I know :).

oneeyedpigeon• 9 years ago

I think if you're relying on the presence of an easter-egg in something you're using in production, you probably have bigger problems.

theprotocol6• 9 years ago

Programmer humor is really cringey. I fully expect to be downvoted for this comment (outside of our cringey humor, we tend to be rather humorless and thin skinned), but so be it.

majewsky2• 9 years ago

My downvote is not because of our collective sense of humor, but because I deny the notion of millions of people sharing a certain collective sense of humor.

fdej• 9 years ago

There is plenty of cringey non-programmer humor.

k__2• 9 years ago

I have to admit, I would never add such a "feature".

But I think it's funny.

Also sad that this kind of culture is dying with the increasing professionalization of the industry.

I often feel a bit like a pioneer, doing this stuff at home when I was young, having fun and later making a living with it.

Now I meet more and more people who just do it because it pays well.

But what can I say, it still pays to have a passion for your job :)

dTal• 9 years ago

"Humorless and thin skinned" is an ironic accusation to throw in a comment consisting entirely of bashing someone else's attempt at humour and whining about downvotes.

imtringued• 9 years ago

At the very least it's neither a hotpocket ad, doesn't load an entire dictionary to show the definition of a single word or contains a high resolution picture of guy fiery.

digi_owl• 9 years ago

I really worry when people voice glee about removing code, in particular code they themselves have not put in and may not know the full history off.

It suggests to me that the person is perhaps not the best curator of the code base under their custody.

phkahler• 9 years ago

Removing code is awesome and makes me happy. Sometimes it's hard to know for certain if it's OK to remove, but that illustrates the point.

BTW I like to remove my own code too, assuming it's become obsolete or replaced. My joy in having a clean and performant present-day product trumps any feelings about past efforts and old code.

emodendroket6• 9 years ago

From context it seemed that the kind of code we're talking about obviously served no real purpose. Most codebases where everyone is afraid to delete anything are unmanageable messes only comprehensible to people who have been working on them for years.

wilun2• 9 years ago

We have invented that really useful thing named version control to know about the history of code.

If yours has commit messages not good enough to properly understand its history, fix that.

emodendroket6• 9 years ago

Yeah, I have never really felt like it was a good idea to commit stuff like that, or comments with profanity or jokes, or any of that stuff. Who wants to be in the position of explaining that if it breaks or your company gets sued or something?

dep_b• 9 years ago

This is what Rickrolls looked like before Rick Ashley recorded his first big hit.

donatj2• 9 years ago

I’m beyond irritated by the presence of an output breaking easteregg in a GNU utility under standard usage. I should be able to depend on my outputs being repeatable.

Honestly, the fact that this got into the codebase makes me question the code review process of GNU and what else is potentially hiding in there.

Boxxed• 9 years ago

Wow. I bet you're really fun at parties.

donatj2• 9 years ago

Parties, yes. I’m a riot, lampshade on the head and what not.

Scripting however I take very seriously.

Accacin• 9 years ago

It was a mistake, has been fixed and wasn't causing problems for six years.

klez• 9 years ago

I know it can be tedious, but if you don't trust a piece of free software you have the opportunity to analyze its source code and decide for yourself if it's ok for your use case.

Also, it's debatable whether `man -w` without further arguments is standard usage, since it's clearly an incomplete command (that should return nonzero, but that's another story).

Clubber2• 9 years ago

I understand what you are saying, but keep in mind, you are also bitching about software you didn't pay for, probably didn't spend time coding, yet get to use for free that probably made your career and livelihood, AND you get the source code for.

Maybe if you took a step back, you wouldn't feel so irritated. You could be stuck working on an AS400.

alvern• 9 years ago

0_0

I remember the days of batch creating UPC barcodes on an AS400

uolo3• 9 years ago

Not that I think it has much relevance as an argument, but my employer pays for Ubuntu. Which in turn seems to be this developers employer. Presumably this is part of his job there, since the commit was made during the day.

As I said, not that I think it matters. But "no one pays for open source" frequently just isn't correct these days.

theli0nheart2• 9 years ago

Like the OP and maintainer said, no one ran into this for 6 years—that's a darn long time in the lifetime of a program. And, as the maintainer said, "it was never meant to affect non-error cases." He pushed a change to fix that [1] and this won't break any builds in the future.

Personally, I really appreciate that a little whimsy was added into a terminal command that's literally built for reading manuals for command-line programs. IMO, this was a net-positive for humanity.

[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=84bd...

petdance2• 9 years ago

It's probably more correct to say "Nobody complained in a public forum for 6 years."

LocalH• 9 years ago

Spoke too soon. It's gone. https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=b225...

MadcapJake• 9 years ago

Seriously, you expect a command meant for users to navigate manuals to be a dependable part of a pipeline?! (it was being run once a minute at that!)

People need to realize this isn't some mission-critical tool, this is a manual reader.

emodendroket6• 9 years ago

Is it not part of a standard set of utilities with standard, expected behavior? You can't really complain if you create some public API and people use it in a way you did not entirely anticipate.

oelmekki2• 9 years ago

You're welcome to write your own version of coreutils, then, if it's that a big deal for you (you may want to take the opportunity to raise the size of buffers everywhere to fit your machines resources realistically).

pdw• 9 years ago

man-db is not a GNU utility. Their URL http://man-db.nongnu.org/ should be a clue :)

Jedd2• 9 years ago

I should be able to depend on my outputs being repeatable.

The output of man is repeatable, and you may depend on that.

Regardless of TZ, dom, dow, etc -- if it's 00:30 local you get this (additional) output. If it's not, you don't.

Steeeve• 9 years ago

Oh please. It's man with no parameters for one minute and the exit code is perfectly fine.

There's humor all over every technical discipline. Lighten up.

The question isn't believable. Your position is hardly believable.

Avamander• 9 years ago

That's why you use return codes not stout?!!?!

Omnius• 9 years ago

Year's ago i was coding a warehouse management system and in this edge case, that required a moon full and blood sacrifice to even have it occur i stuck some debug code/message that was only ever meant for me to try and figure out how it was happening.

5 years later i get a call. "We have a weird error message it says ... How did i even get here! This error is bad and you should feel bad."

bdamm• 9 years ago

As a used-to-be engineering manager for a group of engineers who didn't appreciate how often these "blood sacrifice" errors actually do occur in production, I fully appreciate the kind of "oops" feeling that comes when realizing that your obscure errors messages made it into production. Even something simple like "This has all gone terribly wrong. Call engineering." can make its way to the console of some "customer service" technician talking on the phone with an irate muggle working three companies away, and the error message triggered escalations at all three companies... you start to appreciate that maybe you should take your job seriously, and not make so many assumptions about who is using your software.

HarryHirsch• 9 years ago

My undergraduate advisor would say that each new user uncovers a new class of bugs.

kochthesecond• 9 years ago

Well, most product managers I've dealt with barely wants to think about error cases and error handing. They mostly care about getting the current feature out, and don't care much for the graceful handling of every possible scenario under the moon.

nulagrithom2• 9 years ago

Ah, but there's something to be said for the effectiveness of these weird error messages. Typically the conversation would go: "We got an error come fix it", with no further details. It can be really hard to track down from there.

I experienced something similar when troubleshooting some Chrome issues across a Citrix XenApp farm. It was so incredibly useful to be able to ask the users "Did you get a dinosaur or a He's Dead Jim?" One was a connection issue I could disregard, the other was the memory management problem I was trying to track down.

Sometimes I wonder if we should make all our cryptic, developer-only errors absurd and memorable. I've never had a user tell me anything like "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space error". "The lemur jumped the shark again" gets their attention.

cjsawyer• 9 years ago

I’m a big fan of calling non-software people muggles :)

craigc• 9 years ago

I think people here need to lighten up. I know we are all programmers, and we are sometimes portrayed as snobby and entitled, but we don't have to live up to those stereotypes.

I understand it's frustrating when a tool you use is expected to work a certain way and it doesn't. I understand it's even more frustrating when the output could change depending on the time of day. That doesn't mean it is our place to gang up on an open source tool that is designed to make our lives easier.

I think we should be allowed to have some fun every once in a while, and this "gimme gimme gimme" easter egg is awesome.

It seems the maintainers didn't realize that this easter egg was affecting a command that was designed to have a predictable output so that is the real issue here. Just a simple bug. If this was output on some help screen or something like that then no one would be complaining.

fhood2• 9 years ago

BUT IT IS 12:30 AT NIGHT, THE CLIENT WAS PROMISED DELIVERY OF THIS FEATURE TWO WEEKS AGO, AND I CAN"T FIGURE WHY TF STDERR KEEPS OUTPUTTING GIMME GIMME GIMME!

tener• 9 years ago

Grep source code buddy.

jacalata• 9 years ago

This is a great example of a time when you should go home, get some sleep, and everything will work in the morning :)

bluesmoon2• 9 years ago

The exit value is always 0 regardless of what's printed on stderr. If code parses stderr to determine error state instead of looking at the exit code, then it's doing unix wrong.

fhood2• 9 years ago

Yeah, but you may be parsing standard error regardless.

a_lieb• 9 years ago

Maybe command line tools should have a --no-fun flag to disable all easter eggs. I'm only half kidding. It could be undocumented, but at least it gives you a way to ensure consistent output for tests if you stumble into a problem like this.

jks• 9 years ago

It could just check if the POSIX_ME_HARDER environment variable is defined. http://wiki.wlug.org.nz/POSIX_ME_HARDER

cgmg• 9 years ago

I just don't see a reason to modify important program functionality for the sake of a joke. There are so many other ways to show a sense of humor without doing that.

lomnakkus• 9 years ago

Indeed and those ways have way less chance of causing accidental issues later down the road.

Same deal with profanity, excessive vulgarity or calling out named persons, etc. in error messages.

It's just unprofessional and it can cause all sorts of unforeseen "upstream" issues.

(Even really surprising things like profane class names can cause issues because of things like reflection, etc.)

Jedd2• 9 years ago

The obvious counter to this is to ask what software you've written that many of us use several times a day, every day, and that you refrained from adding any humour to.

Free software almost always has the 'this is provided as is' caveat, and offers access to the source for you to review to ensure it's fit for purpose, so the whole 'This did something I don't approve of' complaint is a bit weak.

Further, the 'important program functionality' may not apply in the case of running the program in an atypical way - that is, without parameters - at a certain time of day.

rapind2• 9 years ago

"we are sometimes portrayed as snobby and entitled"

Huh? That's not at all the stereotype I see associated with programmers. More like the opposite. In fact, a gag like this is much more in line with the stereotype I'm familiar with.

azhenley• 9 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking when I read the stackexchange post. This is just enforcing the stereotype that programmers can't be taken seriously ("bro culture"?).

Simon_says2• 9 years ago

Aren't all times after midnight?

Crespyl• 9 years ago

Midnight is not after midnight.

aeorgnoieang• 9 years ago

Sure it is; the one before it.

nouveau02• 9 years ago

Yes. But, they chose 00:30 because she says "Half past twelve" at the beginning of the song

Simon_says2• 9 years ago

That makes sense. I wasn't familiar with the song.

fusiongyro2• 9 years ago

I had a coworker who would often just throw out a random word as a hapax legomenon if he thought an edge case was unreachable, to make it easy to search the source code. One day we got a call from an analyst: "The program says 'atrocity' and I don't know what I did wrong!"

He also thought it would be funny in another edge case to have the program print out "SB no es bueno." I thought it was funny too...

JadeNB2• 9 years ago

throw out a random word as a hapax legomenon

TIL a new phrase!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon

ams6110• 9 years ago

Really not much different from using a unique "error" number, and certainly easier to communicate without transposition or other unintentional errors:

Compare:

"The program says 'atrocity' and I don't know what I did wrong!"

vs.

"The program says 'error 567231' and I don't know what I did wrong!"

fusiongyro2• 9 years ago

True, but atrocity conveys something extra that 567231 does not. Or at least that's what the humans tell me.

ghamrick• 9 years ago

I worked on an (now obscure) OS named CTOS back in the 80's. In an error message file, the error message that would be delivered in the unlikely event that the correct error message could not be found was "Pressed Rat and Warthog closed down their shop". This was an even more obscure reference to a Cream song that Ginger Baker sang lead on

petdance2• 9 years ago

There's having fun, and then there's violating the Principle of Least Astonishment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...

Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30?

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