Programmer Humor

Like sex, an operating system is better when it's free

I changed the $ in bash to § because fuck capitalism, keep your currency out of my free software

And !

It's a command line tool, used to search and filter text. According to wikipedia it stands for "global regular expression print", which I never knew til today. Essentially, you give it some input text and a regular expression, and grep outputs all the parts of the input that match the regular expression. For example, if I run the command cat server_logs.log | grep ERROR* on my server, grep will print out all the lines in server_logs.log that have the word "ERROR", filtering out all the "WARN" and "INFO" logs.

* The | character is called a pipe, and it's used to pass the output of one command line utility to another. In this example, the command line tool cat prints out the entire text of the file server_logs.log, and that output is then passed as an input to the next utility, grep, who filters it and outputs the filtered result. Piping is unnecessary in this case; in fact I have heard it rather upsettingly referred to as cat abuse, but that's how my fingers remember how to filter files so I thought I'd present it as I wrote it.

I'm gonna tie you too the radiator, and grep you in the mouth for decades, and decades, and decades!

It’s an old lookup tool. I believe it printed the gecos/“meta data about a username logged in” from passwd on UNIX boxes back in the day.

You can do

getent passwd $USER

Has there been “slave” anywhere for a while? The last time I can think is PATA, which is ancient by now.

It seems like most (all?) uses of “master” these days are in the sense of a “master copy”, which doesn’t really have a “master/slave” dynamic to it.

And I’m so glad, and my boomer coworkers still complain

Yeah, I've heard. I've always associated the terms with dom/sub play, not slavery.

I get the reasoning as to why, but it seems odd to me that the IT terms were fixated on, but not the engineering terms; "master" and "slave" are still the accepted terms in the context of hydraulic systems, for example.

It's also generally accepted that "retard" and "retarded" are generally acceptable terms when used in an engineering context. If we can accept that some terms are accepted in the a technical context, it seems inconsistent not to apply the same thinking to IT terminology.

Just more stuff to keep us bickering with each other so we don't look up and realize where all the real problems are coming from, imo.

I use main instead of master on git, but what's the substitute to slave? Especially in master/slave setups like you have 1 processor controlling a bunch of measuring equipment for example.

My worst search was "How to kill orphaned child" I didn't even think about how it sounded until I saw it typed out in the search box lol

It certainly fits. I’ve only heard the term, never heard it used in practice.

Usually half a byte, 4b, but I think the general definition is half of the word size