XFS: Big Filesystem, Big Holes
Born at SGI in 1993, XFS handles enormous files and volumes beautifully. Unfortunately, early XFS had amusingly poor small-file deletion performance, leaving massive metadata holes scattered across disks. Filling disks mysteriously? Maybe you're suffering from ancient XFS sparse-file ghost stories.
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“Foo” and “Bar”: Unix placeholder names stolen from WWII slang
"Foo" and "bar," beloved Unix placeholders, originated as WWII slang. Soldiers borrowed "FUBAR" ("F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition") for broken equipment and absurd orders. Decades later, MIT hackers imported "foo" and "bar" as generic variables, spreading into Unix lore. Unaware of their profane military ancestry, sysadmins worldwide innocently copy "foo/bar"...
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Exit codes and loops: Traps await the unwary
Ever wondered why your shell loop silently dies without warning? Maybe your command has a non-zero exit status, and you’re running your script with “set -e”. Loops with failing commands can silently vanish, leaving you baffled. Sysadmin trick: use explicit error handling instead of trusting Bash’s defaults.
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COBOL: Zombie Language That Refuses to Die
Created in 1959, COBOL was verbose, procedural, and mundane. Yet today, countless banks, airlines, and government agencies remain enslaved by COBOL spaghetti. Its maintenance coders are retiring (or dying) rapidly, forcing panicked attempts at "modernizing" decades-old logic. COBOL’s longevity proves software really can be cursed with immortality.
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EBCDIC: IBM’s Lingering Nightmare
Before ASCII’s global victory, IBM birthed EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code, 1963)—a character encoding so strange, even simple alphabetic sorting failed spectacularly. Banks and mainframes today still use EBCDIC, forcing programmers into awkward transcoding rituals. Yes, your modern banking transactions still secretly chant ancient IBM incantations from the...
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The Slash Wars
Ever wondered why Windows uses backslashes (\) while Unix stubbornly sticks to forward slashes (/)? Blame IBM and Microsoft’s shortsightedness in DOS. Unix pioneered forward-slash file separation, a sensible design choice adopted in URLs. When MS-DOS added directories, forward slashes already had another job—command-line options. In a panicked rush, Gates...
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