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Classic comic reruns every day
<   No. 1159   2006-03-30   >

Comic #1159

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I almost pasted the full text of James Joyce's Ulysses here into the annotation.

I remember back when I was at university. A fellow student put the entire text of Shakespeare's Richard III into his .plan file. Woe betide if you should ever happen to finger his account name.


2015-07-28 Rerun commentary: I suppose these days I might have to explain that last bit.

On a Unix mainframe or minicomputer system with shared access for multiple users at once, there is a command called "finger", which can be used to see the status of any other given user on the system. By issuing a command of the form:

finger <username>

at the command line, you would get an output which showed some brief information about the named user, including whether they were currently logged in or not, and the text of a customisable file which that user would set as a message for anyone who happened to finger them. This customisable text was known as a .plan file (as it existed in a file by that name).

Normally, the contents of a .plan file would be something like a schedule or information on where you could be found if you didn't happen to be logged in at the moment, perhaps including a phone number or a class timetable, for example. Most people's .plan files were thus useful, and consisted of just a few lines of text, which would fit comfortably on your terminal screen.

The entire text of Richard III, in contrast, is over 5000 lines. And on an old style dumb terminal, this would take the better part of a minute to scroll up your screen.

After you tried fingering the aforementioned fellow student two or three times, you never did it again, believe me.

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My comics: Irregular Webcomic! | Darths & Droids | Eavesdropper | Planet of Hats | The Dinosaur Whiteboard | mezzacotta
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Last Modified: Tuesday, 28 July 2015; 03:11:10 PST.
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