UNIX Error Jokes

[Sabre]

Care of Colin

They work with the C shell.
% rm meese-ethics
rm: meese-ethics nonexistent
% ar m God
ar: God does not exist
% "How would you rate Dan Quayle's incompetence?
Unmatched ".
% ^How did the sex changeSHIFT6 operation go?
Modifier failed.

//replace SHIFT6 with ^

% If I had a ( for every $ the Congress spent,
what would I have?
Too many ('s.
% make love
Make: Don't know how to make love. Stop.
% sleep with me
bad character
% got a light?
No match.
% man: why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.
% ^What is saccharine?
Bad substitute.
% %blow
%blow: No such job.

These attempts at humor work with the Bourne shell:
$ PATH=pretending! /usr/ucb/which sense
no sense in pretending!
$ drink <bottle>matter
matter: cannot create

[schvin]

classic

[avriette]

$ drink <bottle>matter
matter: cannot create

I'm not sure that's correct. I would think the shell would break on not having 'bottle' around, and say "bottle: no such file" (I suspect this would be different in different shells, eg. ksh, bash, pdksh). Huh. Yep:

nibbles% drink <bottle>matter
zsh: no such file or directory: bottle

I hate to be the pedant to correct unix jokes... Okay, no, I don't hate being a pedant. The rest of those are just sick. Somebody is clearly bored.

[avriette]

$ drink <bottle>matter
matter: cannot create

I'm not sure that's correct. I would think the shell would break on not having 'bottle' around, and say "bottle: no such file" (I suspect this would be different in different shells, eg. ksh, bash, pdksh). Huh. Yep:

nibbles% drink <bottle>matter
zsh: no such file or directory: bottle

This was actually bothering me.

nibbles% tcsh
[nibbles:~] alex% drink <bottle>matter
tcsh: bottle: No such file or directory.
[nibbles:~] alex% bash
nibbles:~ alex$ drink <bottle>matter
bash: bottle: No such file or directory
nibbles:~ alex$ ksh
$ drink <bottle>matter
ksh: bottle: cannot open [No such file or directory]

Seems that the shell is going to puke on the 404. The first thing it has to do, even before looking for `drink`, is to find the 'bottle' file, and fopen it. fopen would pop, and the whole command would stop there.