tunafish

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)