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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.  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
   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."