3 ms·

If you like man trivia (and why else would you be reading this?) you could check out the top comment at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does

• porise 6mo ago
  Reading this makes me wonder if Easter eggs are ever appropriate for something as ubiquitous as man.
  • bombcar 6mo ago
    Easter eggs are always appropriate but it is imperative (and important) to understand how they could affect anything and everything. Which means you need to usually make it explicit to call them (man --abba or something) than something that "surprises" the user.
  • embedding-shape 6mo ago
    Personally I think ubiquitous software is even more important to have Easter eggs, because they're the most widely distributed, and we want as much joy as we could possibly have, before you know.
  • jedberg 6mo ago
    Almost everything had an easter egg in it back in the day. When computing was more fun and less serious. They fell out of favor when people realized they were a security issue, because it was a code path that rarely got tested.
    • xoxxala 6mo ago
      Or they were removed for other reasons than security. In Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, we had a hidden animation of Captain Kirk's toupee jumping off his head and running out of the room. It was caught before release and they made us take it out since no one wanted to piss off William Shatner.
    • embedding-shape 6mo ago
      No, proper easter eggs don't introduce security issues, they're benign almost by definition. I think what made them disappear was the introduction of all the suit-wearing people who decide what the programmers are supposed to program, with no room for autonomous work within that.
      • jedberg 6mo ago
        > proper easter eggs don't introduce security issues Proper code doesn't either, and yet there they are! The point is they added another attack surface, however small, and another code path that should be tested. When people started to care about 100% test coverage, they started to disappear.
        • embedding-shape 6mo ago
          > The point is they added another attack surface, however small, and another code path that should be tested. I dunno, "attack surface" to me means "facilitate opening/vulnerability somehow" and none of the easter egg code I've seen has done that. You have any concrete examples where a easter egg made possible a security vulnerability that wouldn't be possible otherwise? But yes, another code path created by easter eggs that wasn't tested I've seen countless of times, but never been an issue, but maybe our easter eggs always been too small in scope for that.
          • jedberg 6mo ago
            The most famous is the Xbox hack that was only possible because of an Easter Egg: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/144202/are-there-any-known-exploits-that-come-from-easter-eggs https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/144202/are-ther...
            • hulitu 6mo ago
              Microsoft code. The "hacker" went for the lower hanging fruit.
  • throwanem 6mo ago
    It should make you wonder instead about the appropriateness of testing over man(1) output, I suppose unless you're actually generating the format for use as man(1) input, in which case congratulations on your functional tests doing their job!
• qiine 6mo ago
  "The developer of the man-db, Colin Watson, decided that there was enough fun and the story won't get forgotten" Haha! Adequate amount of fun was provided, please resume regular man activities.
• jedberg 6mo ago
  Another fun related one: If your username is Tyler and you run shutdown, instead of the usual message it will say "Oh, good morning Mr. Tyler, going down?" Discovered this in college when I was shoulder surfing a coworker who always used the username Tyler. When he typed shutdown I called it out, and he said, "wait, it doesn't do that for you? I always assumed it said that for everyone and just replaced the username!". (For those of you too young to know, it's a reference to an Aerosmith song)
  • hulitu 6mo ago
    This was removed years ago from sysvinit, for political reasons.
• cozzyd 6mo ago
  A great innovation over simple AB testing