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Subject: errno(2) codes

The following was sent to me by a friend who was working at HP during the summer. I am posting it here for the people who missed the USENIX conference and who don't get the HP newsgroups.


At the USENIX Association conference in Atlanta recently a contest was held to invent the most humorous/bizarre/etc UN*X error message of the errno(2) ‘EERROR’ type. This contest had been tried at an earlier European Users Group meeting, where the winning entry was:

ENOTOBACCO Read on an empty pipe

You get the idea. A partial [alphabetized] list of ‘top(?)’ entries from Atlanta [and from several readers of hp.unix] follows; if your pun/wierdness tolerance is low, you may want to abandon ship:

EBEFOREI Invalid syntax
ECHERNOBYL Core dumped
ECRAY Program exited before being run
EDINGDONG The daemon is dead
EFLAT System needs tuning
EGEEK Program written by inept Frat member
EIEIO Here-a-bug, there-a-bug, …
EIUD Missing period
ELECTROLUX Your code could stand to be cleaned up
EMILYPOST Wrong fork
END.ARMS.CONTROL Silo overflow
ENOHORSE Mount failed
ENONSEQUETOR C program not derived from main(){printf("Hello, world");}
EWATERGATE Extended tape gap
EWOK Aliens sighted
EWOK Your code appears to have been stir-fried
EWOULDBNICE The feature you want has not been implemented yet

And finally, a sort-of ‘period piece’:

EMR.ED A host is a host,
From coast to coast
And nobody talks to a host that's close,
Unless the host that isn't close
Is busy, hung, or dead.

I would also like this new signal to be supported:

SIGNUKE Nuclear event occurred (cannot be caught or ignored :-)

--Naim Abdullah
  Dept. of EECS,
  Northwestern University,
  ihnp4!nucsrl!naim

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