[plug] The meaning of life

[James Devenish]

In message <OOECKHEBCBMDKGKDPJLHCEGHENAA.jturner at bsis.com.au>
on Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 03:17:39PM +0800, Jay Turner wrote:
> > > $ whatis "the meaning of life" | wc -c
> >
> > On RedHat 9 the meaning of life is apparently 104.  :(  But Debian knows
> > better.  :)
> 
> So what is the meaning of life

It's an in-joke ;-) And asking the above question may make you appear to
be a space alien (and I, for one, welcome our...&c). The answer is:

% whatis 'the meaning of life'|wc -c
42

Just FYI, alternative ("incorrect") responses are numerous. The "trick"
works by counting the number of "characters" (letters & punctuation
symbols) in the response to the whatis command. When the response is
"the meaning of life: nothing appropriate." (as it is under Debian), the
number of characters is 42. Some platforms might not have the trailing
full stop, some platforms might return "the meaning of life: not found",
and I know of at least one platform that produces no output (implying
the meaning of life is zero!!). RedHat must be doing something else
entirely, or it is just very verbose (such that the number of characters
is 104).