tunafish n.
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 droids. 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]
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T =
tune vt.
[from automotive or musical usage] To optimize a program or
system for a particular environment, esp. by adjusting numerical
parameters designed as hooks for
tuning, e.g., by changing #define lines in C. One
may `tune for time' (fastest execution), `tune for space' (least
memory use), or `tune for configuration' (most efficient use of
hardware). See bum, hot spot, hand-hacking.