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What is your favorite joke or cultural reference expressed as a Unix command line?

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11  
Voting for close as cruft. – Adam Davis May 8 '09 at 20:55
32  
Voting to close you as cruft. – chaos May 8 '09 at 20:59
9  
I appreciate your asking politely. No. – chaos May 9 '09 at 16:26
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Personally, I'd vote to close if I had the rep, but whatever. But offering a bounty? WTF? – Graeme Perrow May 11 '09 at 0:04
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Guys, don't take yourselves so seriously. If he wants to spend his bounty like that then let him enjoy it. If you've earned enough rep to offer a bounty then I reckon you deserve some slack. It's fine with me. – Tim Long May 12 '09 at 16:25
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closed as not constructive by sysadmin1138♦ Sep 5 '11 at 19:10

This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.

22 Answers

up vote 54 down vote accepted
+100

No one posted this yet?

wine; talk; touch; unzip; touch; strip; gasp; finger; gasp; mount; fsck; more; yes; gasp; umount; make clean; sleep
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up vote 27 down vote 
find / -user you -iname '*base*' -exec chown us:us {} \;
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up vote 25 down vote 
 $ man woman
 No manual entry for woman
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up vote 24 down vote

Hmmm I really doubt this counts but I enjoy it:

< > ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * < > ~ # 4
& [ ] . . /
| { , , SYSTEM HALTED

The poem can only be appreciated by reading it aloud, to wit:

<  >  !   *  '  '  #
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
^  "    `    $   $  -
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
!  *  =  @  $    _
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
%   *   <  >  ~   #   4
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
&     [    ]   . .  /
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
|       {      ,    ,   SYSTEM HALTED
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.
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up vote 20 down vote 
% man: why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.
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up vote 17 down vote

I remember a few from my unix days back at uni (nearly 20 years ago):

% got a light?
No match.

and

^Where is Jimmy Hoffa
Missing ^
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Unfortunately (?), bash's error messages have improved over the past twenty years, and neither of these are reproducible on my prompt (OS X Leopard), but they're still quite amusing. – Chris Lutz May 9 '09 at 7:32
2  
The 'got a light?' is specific to csh/tcsh (they say got: No match. now, but close enough). ksh gives a passable result for '^Where is Jimmy Hoffa': 'ksh: ^Where: not found [No such file or directory]'. – chaos May 9 '09 at 7:57
lol I see Alnitak changed my prompt. Shows how much I know about unix, really. All I remember is vi keyboard commands and funny messages! :) – Matt Hamilton May 9 '09 at 8:27
@Matt - it's not fixed, but conventionally (t)csh uses % and sh derivatives use '$' – Alnitak May 9 '09 at 13:12
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up vote 14 down vote 
$ PATH=pretending! /usr/bin/which sense
/usr/bin/which: no sense in (pretending!)
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Aw, my which doesn't actually do that. It just gives an error return code. – Matthew Flaschen May 9 '09 at 19:12
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up vote 12 down vote 
% How's my sexual technique?
Unmatched '.
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up vote 12 down vote 
> apt-get moo
         (__) 
         (oo) 
   /------\/ 
  / |    ||   
 *  /\---/\ 
    ~~   ~~   
...."Have you mooed today?"...
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Haah! I never knew about this one! =) – Xerxes May 28 '09 at 16:18
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up vote 11 down vote 
% cat "food in cans"
cat: can't open food in cans
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cat: food in cans: No such file or directory – Osama ALASSIRY May 11 '09 at 16:02
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up vote 9 down vote

Not Unix but SQL;

SELECT * FROM MANAGEMENT WHERE CLUE>0
0 ROWS RETURNED

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up vote 8 down vote 
% scan for <<"Arnold Schwarzenegger"
"Arnold Schwarzenegger": << terminator not found
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1  
Love that one, but it doesn't seem to work on a current csh or tcsh. :( – chaos May 13 '09 at 2:24
2  
Here's a nearly adequate substitute, though: perl -e 'scan for <<"Arnold Schwarzenegger"' – chaos May 14 '09 at 21:09
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up vote 7 down vote

What, nobody has mentioned sudo make me a sandwich?!!

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up vote 7 down vote

I can't believe no one added this classic:

$ %blow
bash: fg: %blow: no such job

And my "implementation" of the popular xkcd comic:

$ make -me sandwich
Make it yourself
$ sudo make -me sandwich
Okay.

And the Makefile:

ifeq ($(shell id -u), 0)
sandwich:
    @echo "Okay."
else
sandwich:
    @echo "Make it yourself"
endif
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Oh, well done indeed. – chaos Jun 29 '09 at 19:48
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up vote 6 down vote 
% If I had a ( for every $ the Congress spent, what would I have?
Too many ('s.
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up vote 3 down vote 
fuser

If only this was the way you removed users from the system. ;-)

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up vote 3 down vote

This was making the rounds in the NYC nerd community in Oct of 2001:

rm -rf /bin/laden
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My father once set something along these lines as a networking exam question. He was very proud of himself for it. – Margaret Jul 8 '09 at 14:10
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up vote 3 down vote

Christmas?

better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus <north pole >town
cat /etc/passwd >list
ncheck list
ncheck list
cat list | grep naughty >nogiftlist
cat list | grep nice >giftlist
santa claus <north pole > town

who | grep sleeping
who | grep awake
who | grep bad || good
for (goodness sake) {be good}

echo "Oh,"

better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus <north pole >town
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up vote 2 down vote 
$ who mom likes

rich
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1  
I don't get that output. Is it based on specific system stuff? – Lucas McCoy May 11 '09 at 1:50
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On a Debian install, from 'man who': "If FILE is not specified, use /var/run/utmp. /var/log/wtmp as FILE is common. If ARG1 ARG2 given, -m presumed: ‘am i’ or ‘mom likes’ are usual." -m shows the hostname and user associated with stdin. So any 'who foo bar' will show the current logged in user. – chaos May 11 '09 at 3:57
Awesome. Alas, OS X's version of 'who' doesn't support such silly behavior. – Chris Lutz May 11 '09 at 15:49
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up vote 2 down vote 
$ make love
make: Don't know how to make love. Stop

Though this is sadly unsupported by GNU Make ('No rule to make target 'love'? Weak!), you can overcome this limitation by installing a BSD make (apt-get install pmake works nicely where applicable) and using it.

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2  
Better is the old version that said "not war," but maybe I'm just a filthy hippie. – Chris Lutz May 12 '09 at 23:49
On FreeBSD 7.2 $make love returns "not war" you filthy hippie – Chance Aug 12 '09 at 21:18
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up vote 1 down vote

This one is a bit more internet-humor-related, but I always loved

chown -R us ./base

As a reference to the "All your base" phenomenon.

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I think you should examine the second-most-upvoted answer more closely. :) – chaos May 15 '09 at 4:53
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up vote 1 down vote 
stop@hammertime:~> touch /this
touch: cannot touch "/this": Permission denied
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touch /this gives me no output, but also doesn't touch anything. !!(debian armel, android kernel, is there something wrong?). – Behrooz Apr 23 '11 at 11:57
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