tunafish
<humour, operating system> In hackish lore, refers to the mutated
punchline of an age-old joke to be found at the bottom of the manual pages of
"tunefs(8)" in the original 4.2BSD distribution. The joke was removed in later
releases once commercial 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 was a "BUGS" section consisting of the line "You
can tune a file system, but you can't tunafish". Variants of this can be seen in
other BSD versions, though it has been excised from some versions by humourless
management droids. The [nt]roff source for SunOS 4.1.1 contains a comment
apparently designed to prevent this: "Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog
your steps from now until the "time_t's wrap around."
[Jargon File]
(1997-01-12)
Nearby terms:
TUI « Tukey, John « Tuki « tunafish » tune »
tunnelling » TUPLE
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