The sys admin's daily grind – The Fuck

Expletives Not Deleted

Article from Issue 191/2016
Author(s):

In the 25 years of Linux kernel history, a huge amount of code and many comments have accumulated. They can be explanatory, enlightening, funny, or even profane. Charly prefers to do things differently, so he types fuck in the shell.

… profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. – Mark Twain

As early as 1998, Sean Dreilinger created the first statistics on swear words in Linux [1]. It showed evidence of a sharp increase of the word "fuck" in kernel 2.1.5. Vidar Holen [2] delved even deeper into the murky depths (Figure 1). He found evidence of almost 50 incidences of "fuck," many incidences of "shit," and even 180 incidences of "bastard."

Figure 1: Kernel versions are shown on the x axis, and incidence of words on the y axis. Top to bottom: crap (blue line), shit (green), penguin (teal), fuck (red), bastard (violet).

How often Linus has raised a warning middle finger against hardware vendors such as Nvidia is unfortunately unknown; however, contemporary historians have probably only investigated the kernel mailing list quantitatively.

Damned Shell!

Cursing has made its way out of the kernel to other system components; a good example of this in many ways is The Fuck [3], a semi-automatic correction function for shell input. The tool, written in Python 3 is installed as follows:

sudo apt install python3 python3-dev
git clone https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck
cd thefuck
sudo ./setup.py install

After installing, if you make a typing error, such as forgetting the space in cd .., you first see the standard -bash: cd..: command not found. However, if you then type fuck, The Fuck suggests the correct command,

cd .. [enter/^/V/ctrl+c]

and you just need to confirm by pressing Enter. Of course, cd.. is a very simple example. Many users will already have created aliases for these typical errors. Incidentally, my favorite alias is

alias doch='sudo $(history -p !-1)'

where doch, in this case, roughly translated into English, could mean "actually" or "of course" (slap forehead). This alias saves me much suppressed cursing after forgetting to sudo.

However, The Fuck can do far more; it can even prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot with more complex Git commands. Ergo, the world needs much more of The Fuck to make it a more polite place.

Charly Kühnast

Charly Kühnast is a Unix operating system administrator at the Data Center in Moers, Germany. His tasks include firewall and DMZ security and availability. He divides his leisure time into hot, wet, and eastern sectors, where he enjoys cooking, freshwater aquariums, and learning Japanese, respectively.

Infos

  1. Linux kernel fuck count: http://durak.org/sean/pubs/kfc/
  2. Linux kernel swear counts: https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/
  3. The Fuck: https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck

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