<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
