About the tunafish thing

[cdybedahl]

For those of you who didn't know what the tunafish things was all about, here's a bit of an explanation.

Unix systems usually have a program called tunefs, with which the administrator can tune the filesystems on a machine to perform optimally. Back in the late 80's, the manual page on one wide-spread Unix variant, 4.2BSD, contained in the BUGS sections the rather lame joke "You can tune a file system, but you can't tunafish". This spread, and was taken out and reinstated over the course of the years, and asof today my FreeBSD machine has "You can tune a filesystem, but you can't tune a fish" in the BUGS section of the tunefs man-page.

The poll question was a result of my reading that page and thinking "waitaminnit here, should that be 'tunafish' rather than 'tune a fish'?". Because that's how I remember it being on the SunOS 4 systems where I first learned Unix.

Comments

[simonb.livejournal.com]

And don't forget the comment which said that if you removed the line the daemons of the system would chase you until time_t wrapped over.

[seaya.livejournal.com]

Uh..this joke is pre-computer, as in musical instrument jokes.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, certainly. But these two exact formulations of it is part of Unix folklore.