Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? (2017)

Right here’s an easter egg in man. In case you scuttle man with out specifying the page or with -w, it outputs “gimme gimme gimme” to stderr, but handiest at 00: 30:

# date +%T -s "00: 30: 00"
00: 30: 00
# man -w
gimme gimme gimme
/usr/native/portion/man:/usr/portion/man:/usr/man

The exit code is steadily 0.

The comely output could presumably presumably additionally impartial nonetheless steadily be:

# man -w
/usr/native/portion/man:/usr/portion/man:/usr/man
# echo $?
0
# man
What manual page would you fancy?
# echo $?
1

The string “gimme gimme gimme” could presumably be gift in RHEL, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian and presumably extra, so it is not always the truth is distro insist. It’s doubtless you’ll well presumably presumably additionally grep your man binary to verify.

This code is accountable for the output, added by this commit:

src/man.c-1167- if (first_arg == argc) {
src/man.c-1168-   /http://twitter.com/#!/marnanel/feature/132280557190119424 */
src/man.c-1169-   time_t now = time (NULL);
src/man.c-1170-   struct tm *localnow = localtime (&now);
src/man.c-1171-   if (localnow &&
src/man.c-1172-       localnow->tm_hour == 0 && localnow->tm_min == 30)
src/man.c: 1173:     fprintf (stderr, "gimme gimme gimmen");

I receive contacted RHEL enhance about this reveal.

The string comes from well diagnosed ABBA track Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Nighttime).

The developer of the man-db, Colin Watson, determined that there turn into once ample relaxing and the narrative could presumably presumably additionally not get forgotten and removed the easter egg totally.

Thank you Colin!