[plug] The meaning of life

[Bennett, Phillip]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Devenish [mailto:devenish at guild.uwa.edu.au]
> Sent: Wednesday, 4 August 2004 3:28 PM
> To: plug at plug.linux.org.au; jturner at bsis.com.au
> Subject: Re: [plug] The meaning of life
> 
> 
> 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).

And FYI: we tried this with a mandrake 9.2 and a mandrake 10 box and it is
the version of whatis that is the error (I think).  It is not being passed
as "The meaning of life", but rather as four seperate arguements, "the"
"Meaning" " of" and "life" and hence gives the 104 characters... :(
Apparently this is very wrong in regards to the double quotes...

Phil.
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