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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