https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030 Skip to main content Stack Exchange Network Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. Visit Stack Exchange [ ] Loading... 1. + Tour Start here for a quick overview of the site + Help Center Detailed answers to any questions you might have + Meta Discuss the workings and policies of this site + About Us Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, and our products 2. 3. current community + Unix & Linux help chat + Unix & Linux Meta your communities Sign up or log in to customize your list. more stack exchange communities company blog 4. 5. Log in 6. Sign up Unix & Linux 1. 1. Home 2. Questions 3. Tags 4. 5. Users 6. Jobs 7. Companies 8. Unanswered 2. Teams Now available on Stack Overflow for Teams! AI features where you work: search, IDE, and chat. Learn more Explore Teams 3. Teams 4. Ask questions, find answers and collaborate at work with Stack Overflow for Teams. Explore Teams Teams Q&A for work Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Learn more about Teams Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? Ask Question Asked 6 years, 10 months ago Modified 2 years, 9 months ago Viewed 515k times 1944 We've noticed that some of our automatic tests fail when they run at 00:30 but work fine the rest of the day. They fail with the message gimme gimme gimme in stderr, which wasn't expected. Why are we getting this output? * date * man Share Improve this question Follow edited Jul 15, 2021 at 10:55 AdminBee's user avatar AdminBee 23k2424 gold badges5050 silver badges7575 bronze badges asked Nov 20, 2017 at 14:19 Jaroslav Kucera's user avatar Jaroslav KuceraJaroslav Kucera 10.1k55 gold badges1616 silver badges3030 bronze badges 7 * 5 Linking in: Where is the latest source code of man command for linux? - Jeff Schaller Commented Nov 20, 2017 at 14:29 * 68 I don't get it. Why does your test script call man where it should fail? - Joshua Commented Nov 20, 2017 at 16:20 * 26 @Joshua Because we wanted the "manpath" - 'man -w'. See the answer. - Jaroslav Kucera Commented Nov 20, 2017 at 17:48 * 81 for the sake of history, why do you need to do a 'man -w' every minutes? what are you really testing? - Olivier Dulac Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 10:12 * 28 @OlivierDulac It's being triggered just once in the test. We've rearanged the order of tests and suddenly this error apeared as it was triggered at 00:30... - Jaroslav Kucera Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 11:52 | Show 2 more comments 3 Answers 3 Sorted by: Reset to default [Highest score (default) ] 2579 +300 Dear @colmmacuait, I think that if you type "man" at 0001 hours it should print "gimme gimme gimme". #abba [ @marnanel - 3 November 2011 ] er, that was my fault, I suggested it. Sorry. Pretty much the whole story is in the commit. The maintainer of man is a good friend of mine, and one day six years ago I jokingly said to him that if you invoke man after midnight it should print "gimme gimme gimme", because of the Abba song called "Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight": Well, he did actually put it in. A few people were amused to discover it, and we mostly forgot about it until today. I can't speak for Col, obviously, but I didn't expect this to ever cause any problems: what sort of test would break on parsing the output of man with no page specified? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that one turned up eventually, but it did take six years. (The commit message calls me Thomas, which is my legal first name though I don't use it online much.) This issue has been fixed with commit 84bde8: Running man with man -w will no longer trigger this easter egg. Share Follow edited Nov 22, 2017 at 1:50 PF4Public's user avatar PF4Public 1351111 bronze badges answered Nov 21, 2017 at 0:20 Marnanel Thurman's user avatar Marnanel ThurmanMarnanel Thurman 7,86922 gold badges1010 silver badges1010 bronze badges 10 * 456 Oops! It was never meant to affect non-error cases. I didn't take account of this when I implemented git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/ man-db.git/commit/.... Fixed in master: git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/ man-db.git/commit/... - Colin Watson Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 9:55 * 3 Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. - terdon Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 17:45 * 14 The comments are for asking for clarification and/or discussing the technical points of an answer. If you want to discuss the merits of Easter eggs, please take it to chat. - terdon Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 17:46 * 51 Mamma mia, now I really know! - Enlico Commented Jul 15, 2018 at 13:25 * 23 perhaps man needs a --seriously parameter - Patrick Taylor Commented Oct 3, 2018 at 6:08 | Show 5 more comments 507 This is an easter egg in man. When you run man without specifying the page or with -w, it outputs "gimme gimme gimme" to stderr, but only at 00:30: # date +%T -s "00:30:00" 00:30:00 # man -w gimme gimme gimme /usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/man The exit code is always 0. The correct output should always be: # man -w /usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/man # echo $? 0 # man What manual page do you want? # echo $? 1 The string "gimme gimme gimme" can be found in RHEL, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian and probably more, so it's not really distro specific. You can grep your man binary to verify. This code is responsible for the output, added by this commit: src/man.c-1167- if (first_arg == argc) { src/man.c-1168- /* http://twitter.com/#!/marnanel/status/132280557190119424 */ src/man.c-1169- time_t now = time (NULL); src/man.c-1170- struct tm *localnow = localtime (&now); src/man.c-1171- if (localnow && src/man.c-1172- localnow->tm_hour == 0 && localnow->tm_min == 30) src/man.c:1173: fprintf (stderr, "gimme gimme gimme\n"); I have contacted RHEL support about this issue. The string comes from well known ABBA song Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight). --------------------------------------------------------------------- The developer of the man-db, Colin Watson, decided that there was enough fun and the story won't get forgotten and removed the easter egg completely. Thank you Colin! Share Improve this answer Follow edited Nov 22, 2017 at 8:06 answered Nov 20, 2017 at 14:19 Jaroslav Kucera's user avatar Jaroslav KuceraJaroslav Kucera 10.1k55 gold badges1616 silver badges3030 bronze badges 11 * 170 On platforms with faketime available you can try this without even needing to change the system time: faketime '00:30:00' man (Debian 8). - Chris Davies Commented Nov 20, 2017 at 15:05 * 6 @rrauenza There is the buzilla ticket: bugzilla.redhat.com/ show_bug.cgi?id=1515352 - Jaroslav Kucera Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 7:41 * 46 The author has now tightened the easter egg to only run on man, not man -w: git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/src/... and Colin's comment on Marnanel's confessio^Wanswer. - Martijn Pieters Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 10:09 * 38 Let's mention that the initial commit triggered at 12:01am. A followup commit changed that to 12:30am with the commit log message "half past twelve" which is again quoted from the same song. - egmont Commented Nov 21, 2017 at 21:00 * 8 @0x90 man -w prints the current manual page search path, which is the sort of thing you might quite reasonably use as a building block for something else, for example if the thing you were automating involved installing or testing manual pages. - Colin Watson Commented Nov 25, 2017 at 20:06 | Show 6 more comments 463 After some reflection, I've removed this Easter egg. It'll be gone in the upcoming man-db 2.8.0. I'm glad that it made some people smile, which after all was the whole purpose of it, and my Twitter notifications and so on today suggest that most people thought it was more amusing than annoying. Still, some people did find it annoying, and six years seems like a pretty good run for that sort of thing; it probably isn't going to get significantly better exposure than it already unexpectedly has by way of this question. Time to put it to bed. Share Improve this answer Follow answered Nov 22, 2017 at 1:47 Colin Watson's user avatar Colin WatsonColin Watson 3,89811 gold badge1010 silver badges1515 bronze badges 14 * 165 I'm really sad you decided that. IMO too many people have it out for easter eggs. - Seth Commented Nov 22, 2017 at 1:52 * 47 I won't rule out adding something different in the future, albeit with more care! It was getting a bit stale, though, and humour does require novelty. - Colin Watson Commented Nov 22, 2017 at 1:54 * 38 I have to agree with @Seth, it is sad to see something go which made most of us smile, we need more of that actually on this world. - Videonauth Commented Nov 22, 2017 at 3:00 * 235 I hope this does not break any workflows xkcd.com/1172 - lakshayg Commented Nov 22, 2017 at 4:41 * 91 @ColinWatson I think disabling this in a default flow is a good idea, so it doesn't break anyone's workflow. But at the same time, it's a shame such a masterpiece had to be removed. You could add a special flag like man -abba and when fired after midnight would give the easter egg. - Bartlomiej Skwira Commented Nov 22, 2017 at 11:07 | Show 9 more comments You must log in to answer this question. Highly active question. Earn 10 reputation (not counting the association bonus) in order to answer this question. The reputation requirement helps protect this question from spam and non-answer activity. Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged * date * man . * The Overflow Blog * Community Products Roadmap Update, October 2024 * Meet the AI native developers who build software through prompt engineering * Featured on Meta * Preventing unauthorized automated access to the network * Upcoming initiatives on Stack Overflow and across the Stack Exchange network... Linked 279 What is the real difference between "apt-get" and "aptitude"? (How about "wajig"?) 343 What's the story behind Super Cow Powers? 130 What does the (!) mean after uptime on htop 28 Where is the latest source code of man command for linux? 17 What does the "3am" section means in manpages? 17 Why does oot say "hey" in usleep -o? 6 Why does abiword tell users to get a life? 2 Does anyone remember "wow"? Related 2 Why date output X-3 instead X-2 days when I am doing arithmetic operations 4 How do you correctly extract all command synopses from manpages in / usr/share/man/man1? 7 `man --html` and `man --gxditview` exit with errors? 1 create custom profile to run man using firejail 5 Why a text editor shows different from cat command 2 Debian 11 (Bullseye): man stopped working after upgrade? 1 Bash looks for the wrong executable for man 3 Why does `makewhatis` choke on symbolically linked directories, and how can I fix/avoid it? Hot Network Questions * There are 6 identical squares in the diagram below, What is the sum of their areas? * Does Sauron ever show sadness or despair over deaths or suffering in Tolkien's writings? * Did Kant actually read Aristotle or did he just become aware of it indirectly through commentators? * Is it possible that SELECT query is blocking nodes synchronization in Always On? * What was the name of an old D&D module involving a clockwork mansion & two rival mages? * Which symmetry corresponds to the conservation of particle number in *real* scalar field theory? * Window switch -- circuit board contacts * What is the relevance of mention of women in Jesus' Genealogy? * Is this amount of chain slack normal? * How to use container in WSL 2, without installing the Hyper-v feature? * What choice principles does "every set is in bijection with a transitive set" imply? * Numbers with this property show up frequently * Airport security confiscated umbrella * How do I burn a debian distribution ISO into a bootable disk using Fedora's command-line tools? * Calculate optimal game upgrades * Why would my male soldiers not use steroids? * Negation of WARP * Opening a file in three splits of specific sizes from the command line * How do switch mode power supplies solve the half energy loss problem in the charging of a capacitor? * Can a Merchant Really Charge to My Credit Card with Only the Number, Name and Expiry Date? * Is it legal to record a busy public street, use facial recognition and then sell access to archived footage? * Does REIT ETF count as "Hard Assets"? * After traveling 250,000,000 miles, how much is the laser from the Psyche spacecraft attenuated by having to go through Earth's atmosphere? * Why should one use globs over regex when doing filename pattern matching? more hot questions Question feed Subscribe to RSS Question feed To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. [https://unix.stackex] * Unix & Linux * Tour * Help * Chat * Contact * Feedback Company * Stack Overflow * Teams * Advertising * Talent * About * Press * Legal * Privacy Policy * Terms of Service * Cookie Settings * Cookie Policy Stack Exchange Network * Technology * Culture & recreation * Life & arts * Science * Professional * Business * API * Data * Blog * Facebook * Twitter * LinkedIn * Instagram Site design / logo (c) 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under CC BY-SA . rev 2024.10.3.16276 Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. This site is not affiliated with Linus Torvalds or The Open Group in any way.