> probably for the same reason the hpux manual page has the line, "you
> can't tune a fish." and a number of other unix man pages through
> history have had varius levels of humor injected in them. namely the
> reason is:
>> documentation writing sucks, at least let the poor bastard doing it
> inject some humor into the whole process.
Indeed. I had missed the reference to the sucker rod earlier on in the
document.
The "you can tune a filesystem, but you can't tune a fish" legend is present
in the man pages for tunefs on many versions of unix these days. I remember
a number of years back (when I was still using hpux), reading an thread on
comp. about this very text. Apparently, when HP were localising HPUX into
Japanese, as often happens, the person who was translating the man page
didn't really understand that particular line, and when translated back into
english, the japanese read something like "you can modify a disk, but you
can't change a fish".
To the best of my knowledge, this line is now omitted from the japanese
version.
Nick
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