This question is left open because it was historically allowed, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site and would be closed if asked today.
More info: https://unix.stackexchange.com/faq
I saw a t-shirt reading 'anything you say gets piped to /dev/null', not incredibly funny but amusing at least.
Does anyone else have any good one-liner *nix jokes?
I mount my soul at /dev/null - a colleague
Unix is user-friendly. It's just picky about who its friends are.
(I don't know the origin. There are several variant formulations floating around. T-shirt (first google hit)
There are two major products of Berkeley, CA -- LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be strictly by coincidence.
Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
— Henry Spencer
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
— Doug Gwyn
FreeBSD make:
$ make love
Not war.
$
or bsdmake on OS X:
$ make love
make: don't know how to make love. Stop
$
These are all taken from here. A lot of these don't seem to work on newer shells, but they're still possible to laugh at.
% make fire
Make: Don't know how to make fire. Stop.
% why not?
No match.
% gotta light?
No match.
% !1984
1984: Event not found. # (on some systems)
% How's my lovemaking?
Unmatched '.
% "How would you rate Bush's incompetence?
Unmatched ".
% [Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
Missing ].
% [Where is my brain?
Missing ].
% ^How did the sex change^ operation go?
Modifier failed.
% If I had a ( for every $ Congress spent, what would I have?
Too many ('s.
% man: why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.
% %blow
%blow: No such job.
% \(-
(-: Command not found.
% sh
$ PATH=pretending! /usr/ucb/which sense
no sense in pretending!
$ mkdir matter; cat >matter
matter: cannot create
% cd /tmp
% touch this; chmod 000 this
% ln -s /usr/bin/touch U
% U this
U: cannot touch this: no write permission
% rm meese-ethics
rm: meese-ethics nonexistent
% ar m God
ar: God does not exist
% make love
Make: Don't know how to make love. Stop.
Supposedly on older Sun's make will also tell you
Make: Don't know how to make love. How about war instead?
% sleep with me
bad character
% ^What is saccharine?
Bad substitute.
% drink yellow_pages
yellow_pages: Is a directory
%touch me
%chmod 000 me
%touch me
touch: cannot touch me: permission denied
% ar x "my love life"
ar: my love life does not exist
% ar x "matey, the treasure"
ar: matey, the treasure does not exist
% talk Gorvachev@Kremlin
talk: Kremlin: Can't figure out network address.
% talk Comrade Khruchev
[Your party is not logged on]
I didn't see this for a while now:
Unix is sexy: who | grep -i blonde | date; cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a UNIX user to show you how it's done.
— Scott Adams, Dilbert Cartoonist
Here are a couple of T-shirt slogans:
There is no place like ~
My favorite:
Thou shalt not kill -9
There is no place like ~ is so much better than There is no place like 127.0.0.1 which makes no sense...
Here's a nickel, kid. Get yourself a better computer.
That line, from an old Dilbert cartoon, is now famous enough that you don't even need the rest of the cartoon anymore.
Here it is anyway:
OK, this is cheating, but still a lot of fun!
Play around with the command line version of xkcd webcomic:
http://uni.xkcd.com/
Go ahead, type in your commands!
Here's what you you can expect:
You don't exist. Go away.
Message from various programs when they try to look up your user info by user ID and that fails.
Reasons that can happen:
/etc/passwd is corruptutmp fileFound in early Unix sources:
/*
* You are not expected to understand this.
*/
if(rp->p_flag & SSWAP) {
rp->p_flag =& ~SSWAP;
aretu(u.u_ssav);
}
(Lightly edited.)
stop@hammertime:~> touch /this
touch: cannot touch "/this": Permission denied
My favorites:
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to
understand the simplicity.
Dennis Ritchie
And:
One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.
Ken Thomson
Sex Drugs and UNIX (Usenix '83)
From the cover of the book 'A quarter Century of Unix' by Peter H. Salus
when installed :
The Sad Story
[root@localhost root]# gcc homework.c -o homework.c
[root@localhost root]#
[root@localhost root]# ls
homework.c
[root@localhost root]#
The Contradiction
less > more
The name came from the joke of doing "backwards more." To help remember the difference between less and more, a common joke is to say, "less > more," implying that less has greater functionality than more. - from wikipedia
I read your mail.
I read /var/spool/mail/$USER (or is it referring to the command? Hmm...)
Feb 26, 2011 at 23:41
A more traditional version of the dirty joke echox posted:
TOUCH GREP UNZIP MOUNT FSCK FSCK FSCK UMOUNT
hm, maybe this one:
In a world without walls or fences who needs windows or gates.
I know it's lame but true too :)
Not specific to *nix but related to coders:
Code is like fart, you support only yours.