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
   {droid}s. 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]
    

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)