spoiler
Hopefully it's funny enough to offset that I'm reposting my own post.
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
200 points (95.0% liked)
linuxmemes
32859 readers
636 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack users for any reason. This includes using blanket terms, like "every user of thing".
- Don't get baited into back-and-forth insults. We are not animals.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry of any kind will not be tolerated. This is an LGBTQ+-friendly community -- if that is a problem for you, you should leave.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn, no politics, no trolling or ragebaiting.
- Don't come looking for advice, this is not the right community.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, <loves / tolerates / hates> systemd, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
5. π¬π§ Language/ΡΠ·ΡΠΊ/Sprache
- This is primarily an English-speaking community. π¬π§π¦πΊπΊπΈ
- Comments written in other languages are allowed.
- The substance of a post should be comprehensible for people who only speak English.
- Titles and post bodies written in other languages will be allowed, but only as long as the above rule is observed.
6. (NEW!) Regarding public figures
We all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations. - Keep discussions polite and free of disparagement.
- We are never in possession of all of the facts. Defamatory comments will not be tolerated.
- Discussions that get too heated will be locked and offending comments removed. Β
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I just spend a couple of minutes researching and trying to understand the joke, but I'm sorry to say my efforts have been unsuccessful. How much ultra-specific information am I expected to know here?
Disclaimer: it's past my bed time and my brain is malfunctioning accordingly, so this might be on me
Unix philosophy is 1 program = 1 function, so if you want to send a email Unix way you use 1 program to write the email (vim of course) and another program to send it. The joke here is that sex is a functionality to the alistra program making it not ok with the Unix philosophy, therefore that functionality is going to move to its own program alistsex
I know generally what alistral is, but I've never uses it. What does the "sex' command do or what's the joke about it? The description is blank in the documentation and I'm too exhausted from work to dig into the code repo, lol.
Run it I dare you :3
spoiler
It links to this recording https://musiclinkz.alephrium.com/release/a597ae76-61dd-4196-9b29-a9bd4bbf9bceSo.. tar x should really be a separate program than tar c? They're doing different functions
Yes, like
gzipandgunzipWhat if I write a program that checks argv[0] to decide which part of the code to run, and makes a bunch of symlinks
That's actually what BusyBox does I think. You have one executable for everything and it changes the behavior according to argv[0].
Then that would kind of defeat the purpose
But it's not like you /have/ to adhere to the Unix philosophy or anything
Naa, tar handles archives, it should know how to archive and unarchive really well. It shouldn't know how to compress or un compress or sort it's output by human readable file sizes. If you add the -z or -j, for example, to your tar command, tar will filter your archive through gunzip or bunzip prior to doing it's job of un archiving all your files. If you use the -f flag, tar will spit out a list of files that were operated on. Adding a sort -h feature to tar would violate the unix philosophy.
Trying to comprehend. Canβt any function be broken up to limitless sub functions? Doesnβt writing email fall under the function of sending email? Where can I read the docs about this?
Writing an email and sending it are pretty different functions, it's doesn't looks like that because the sending part is just pressing a bottom and all the protocols and sever communication is done in the background hide from the user.
It's like asking the postal service to also write and package your mail and then open and read it for the recipient.
I personally like that philosophy and try to use it in my job, with functions that only do one job and programs that only do one job and then just chain them and make calls from each other. My users doesn't know it's like that and they doesn't notice any difference, but it's help me debugging or implementing new functionalities.
Can writing writing a word and formatting it bold and underlined not be considered three separate functions, requiring three different programs? That's what the comment above was talking about
You need two programs for that, one to write the text and other to display it with the format because different encodings can format differently.
Don't press my bottom, please.
In "The UNIX Programming Environment" from 1984, mail is described like this:
"Sending mail to someone is straightforward. Suppose it is to go to the person with the login name nico.
$ mail nico
Now type in the text of the letter
on as many lines as you like...
After the last line of the letter
type a control-d.
ctl-d
$"
This is also why SMTP is such a fucked up protocol. It was designed so that you could just follow the email protocol by hand. HTTP as well followed this philosophy (up to 2.0 at least). A decade or so ago there was a bug in outlook where you couldn't have a line with only a period in it because that's the end-of-email signal in SMTP.
I tend to think in terms of 1 function that is meaningful for composability. The point in having small tools is that they can be combined in new ways, not just small programs for its own sake. To me it makes sense if you think of Unix itself as both the IDE and the system carrying out the purpose of the machine. We've gradually moved away from this though.
From sleepy brain to another, it's a joke that Unix purists will go out of their way to remove a "sex" command just because it's not following the unix philosphy.
There was 0 actual complaint, however, I will indeed remove the joke command as it won't be the funny number version anymore
So what is alistral and what did the sex command do?
Music cli. Sex seems to be joke option.
You'll know when you're older