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,Open}BSD. 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 droid s. 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...

