tunafish
 n.

    In hackish lore, refers to the mutated punchline of an age-old joke to be
    found at the bottom of the manual pages of tunefs(8) in the original BSD
    4.2 distribution. The joke was removed in later releases once commercial
    sites started using 4.2, but apparently restored on the 4.4BSD tape and in
    Net,Free,OpenBSD. Tunefs relates to the tuning of file-system parameters
    for optimum performance, and at the bottom of a few pages of wizardly
    inscriptions was a ?BUGS? section consisting of the line ?You can tune a
    file system, but you can't tunafish?. Variants of this can be seen in other
    BSD versions, though it has been excised from some versions by humorless
    management droids. The [nt]roff source for SunOS 4.1.1 contains a comment
    apparently designed to prevent this: ?Take this out and a Unix Demon will
    dog your steps from now until the time_t's wrap around.?

    [It has since been pointed out that indeed you can tunafish. Usually at a
    canning factory... ?ESR]

tunafish

    In hackish lore, refers to the
   mutated punchline of an age-old joke to be found at the bottom
   of the manual pages of "tunefs(8)" in the original 4.2BSD
   distribution.  The joke was removed in later releases once
   commercial sites started using 4.2.  Tunefs relates to the
   "tuning" of file-system parameters for optimum performance,
   and at the bottom of a few pages of wizardly inscriptions was
   a "BUGS" section consisting of the line "You can tune a file
   system, but you can't tunafish".  Variants of this can be seen
   in other BSD versions, though it has been excised from some
   versions by humourless management droids.  The [nt]roff source
   for SunOS 4.1.1 contains a comment apparently designed to
   prevent this: "Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog your
   steps from now until the "time_t's wrap around."

   [Jargon File]

   (1997-01-12)