tunafish
tunafish: n. 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 BSD 4.2 distribution. The joke was
removed in later releases once commercial sites started using 4.2,
but apparently restored on the 4.4BSD tape and in
{Net,Free,Open}BSD. 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 humorless 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."
[It has since been pointed out that indeed you can tunafish.
Usually at a canning factory... --ESR]
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