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).

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subs
Digisubs
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Expletives and the Kernel List

    Kernel amateurs are best advised to read summaries of the heated discussions on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) before they delve in. We analyze 2.5 million postings to study the density of cursing.

    more »
  • The sys admin's daily grind: Smorgasbord

    Sys admin columnist Charly Kühnast has an electronic note box in which he collects ideas and small snippets of code. He calls it his "quarry" and is taking this opportunity to offer up some collectors' items to regular readers.

    more »
  • Con Kolivas Introduces New BFS Scheduler

    After two years deep into Linux, the Australian Con Kolivas has emerged with a new scheduler that above all should provide significantly better performance on dual and quad processors.

    more »
  • Charly’s Column: Cluster SSH

    Charly doesn’t relish the idea of searching through the logfiles of a dozen proxy servers when page requests fail. Now that he has deployed Cluster SSH, he can pull the strings on many machines at the same time.

    more »
  • Charly's Column: Metasploitable

    If you mess around with a pen-testing tool on your own network, you might survive the consequences, but chances are you'll take the prize for outstanding recklessness. Charly has some advice: Use Metasploitable, perhaps the most broken Linux ever.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus