From: sime1brt (sime1brt@topvideo.net)
Date: Sun May 16 1999 - 12:32:03 CEST
/dev/null is full!
Straight from the department of General Humor
A major bug was detected today in all Unix-like operating systems.
Millions and millions of people have been redirecting error
messages and standard output to /dev/null for decades without bothering
to think about what happened to that data. It appears that the
data just stayed in /dev/null, and we are now facing the
consequences: /dev/null is full.
For Unix users, /dev/null was a convenient way to destroy messages
that they did not understand or were too lazy to to read: warnings
from programs they used, bug reports concerning programs they wrote,
messages from the boss and other uninteresting emails, etc. From now
on, they will be forced to read everything. This will result in a
massive loss of time for all Unix users.
No Unix guru had ever predicted that /dev/null would be full one
day.
Mr. Kernighan declined comment, saying, "Ask Mr. Ritchie. He had the
idea of that /dev/null thing." Mr. Ritchie said, "No, I think it was
Mr. Thompson". Mr. Thompson responded: "Well, it's been a long
time, but I'm sure it was not me."
Thirty minutes after this bug was made public, Microsoft released a
security patch for its Windows NT operating system. However, it
was removed from the Web site when Microsoft engineers noticed
that /dev/null did not exist on Windows NT and thus it was not
affected by the bug. The security patch they had released was an
empty file.
Unix gurus warn that we should also be careful about the standard
input (also known as stdin), because many people have been reading
things from the standard input for years, and it may be empty very
soon.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*--*-*--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>[...] ho perso il gusto di fare paragoni con "MS Win*": è
>come sparare sulla croce rossa... [...]
Come sparare al camion della nettezza urbana, vuoi dire.
(Michele Andreoli)
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