tunafish

   In  hackish  lore, refers to the mutated punchline of an age-old joke
   to  be  found  at  the bottom of the manual pages of tunefs(8) in the
   original  {BSD}  4.2  distribution.  The  joke  was  removed in later
   releases  once  commercial  sites  started  using 4.2, but apparently
   restored on the 4.4BSD tape and in {Net,Free,Open}BSD. Tunefs relates
   to  the tuning of file-system parameters for optimum performance, and
   at  the  bottom  of a few pages of wizardly inscriptions was a `BUGS'
   section  consisting  of the line "You can tune a file system, but you
   can't  tunafish". Variants of this can be seen in other BSD versions,
   though it has been excised from some versions by humorless management
   {droid}s.  The  [nt]roff  source  for  SunOS 4.1.1 contains a comment
   apparently  designed to prevent this: "Take this out and a Unix Demon
   will dog your steps from now until the time_t's wrap around."

   [It  has since been pointed out that indeed you can tunafish. Usually
   at a canning factory... --ESR]

[glossary]