Fun_People Archive
20 Mar
Unix Wizard

Date: Mon, 20 Mar 95 23:35:34 PST
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: Unix Wizard

[More for the Music of Unix file... -psl]

Forwarded-by: tompar@world.std.com (Tom Parmenter)
Forwarded-by: Jerry Leichter <leichter@lrw.com>
From: Jamie Mason <jmason2@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>

(To the tune of Pinball Wizard)

   Unix Wizard

Ever since I heard of Unix
I've always had a ball,
  From Berkeley up to Linux
I must've run 'em all;
But I ain't seen nothing like him
On systems large or small
That tired, squinting, blind kid
Sure makes a mean sys call!

He sits just like a statue,
Like part of the machine,
Feeling all the limits,
Knows what signals mean,
Hacks by intuition,
His process never stalls,
That tired, squinting, blind kid
Sure makes a mean sys call!

He's a Unix Wizard,
I just can't get the gist
A Unix wizard's
Got such a mental twist.

How do you think he does it?
I don't know!
What makes him so good?

Ain't got no distractions,
Don't hear no biffs or bells,
Don't see no lights a flashin'
Ignores his sense of smell,
Patches running kernels
Dumps no core at all,
That tired, squinting, blind kid
Sure makes a mean sys call!

I thought I was
The process table king,
But I've just handed
My root password to him.

Even on my own hot boxes,
His hacks can beat my best.
The network leads him in,
And he just does the rest.
He's got crazy Finger servers
Never will seg-fault...
That tired, squinting, blind kid
Sure makes a mean sys call!

© 1995 Peter Langston