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)
Read Also:
- Tunbridge-ware
[tuhn-brij] /ˈtʌnˌbrɪdʒ/ noun 1. decorative wooden ware, including tables, trays, boxes, and ornamental objects, produced especially in the late 17th and 18th centuries in Tunbridge Wells, England, with mosaiclike marquetry sawed from square-sectioned wooden rods of different natural colors.
- Tunbridge-wells
noun 1. a city in SW Kent, in SE England: mineral springs; resort. Tunbridge Wells /ˈtʌnˌbrɪdʒ/ noun 1. a town and resort in SE England, in SW Kent: chalybeate spring discovered in 1606; an important social centre in the 17th and 18th centuries. Pop: 60 095 (2001) Official name Royal Tunbridge Wells
- Tundish
noun, Metallurgy. 1. (in a vacuum induction furnace) a trough through which molten metal flows under vacuum to a mold chamber. 2. Also called pouring box, pouring basket, pouring basin. a refractory-lined vessel having holes for distributing metal being teemed into ingot molds.
- Tundra
noun 1. one of the vast, nearly level, treeless plains of the arctic regions of Europe, Asia, and North America. noun 1. a vast treeless zone lying between the ice cap and the timberline of North America and Eurasia and having a permanently frozen subsoil (as modifier): tundra vegetation tundra (tŭn’drə) A cold, treeless, usually […]
- Tundra-swan
noun 1. a swan, Cygnus columbianus, nesting in tundra regions of both the New and Old Worlds, having a black bill with a yellow spot at the base.