A Weird Imagination

Man Humor

Posted in

man (and its lesser known cousin apropos) are invaluable resources for using the command-line on Linux. While the information is useful, sometimes they can also be entertaining, particularly in the BUGS sections. Some due to being overly honest like nethack's which merely states

Probably infinite.

or bash's which admits

It's too big and too slow.

My personal favorite is the passage in the BUGS section for xargs, which, after a two paragraph long discussion on the interaction between the -i, -I, and -s flags finally concludes

Instead, the -i option should not impose a line length limit, which is why this discussion appears in the BUGS section.

Some have comments that are merely strange, like the BUGS section for screen, which, among many other comments, includes the bug

A weird imagination is most useful to gain full advantage of all the features.

which is where this blog gets it name.

Hello World!

Posted in

Welcome to my blog. I am Daniel Perelman; I am presently a computer science graduate student at the University of Washington.

Much of my time is spent writing programs and using various highly-configurable tools like Bash, Vim, and LaTeX. I, like many other users of these tools, find myself often performing web searches for help on how to use these tools. Thanks to StackExchange and myriad technical blogs, the answers I am looking for are often close at hand. But not always. Sometimes I end up piecing together a solution from many sources. This blog is a place for me to save others time by sharing that knowledge.