The following was sent to me by a friend who was working at HP during the summer. I am posting it here for the people who missed the USENIX conference and who don't get the HP newsgroups.

At the USENIX Association conference in Atlanta recently a contest was held to invent the most humorous/bizarre/etc UN*X error message of the errno(2) ‘EERROR’ type. This contest had been tried at an earlier European Users Group meeting, where the winning entry was:

ENOTOBACCO Read on an empty pipe

You get the idea. A partial [alphabetized] list of ‘top(?)’ entries from Atlanta [and from several readers of hp.unix] follows; if your pun/wierdness tolerance is low, you may want to abandon ship:

EBEFOREI Invalid syntax ECHERNOBYL Core dumped ECRAY Program exited before being run EDINGDONG The daemon is dead EFLAT System needs tuning EGEEK Program written by inept Frat member EIEIO Here-a-bug, there-a-bug, … EIUD Missing period ELECTROLUX Your code could stand to be cleaned up EMILYPOST Wrong fork END.ARMS.CONTROL Silo overflow ENOHORSE Mount failed ENONSEQUETOR C program not derived from main(){printf("Hello, world");} EWATERGATE Extended tape gap EWOK Aliens sighted EWOK Your code appears to have been stir-fried EWOULDBNICE The feature you want has not been implemented yet

And finally, a sort-of ‘period piece’:

EMR.ED A host is a host,

From coast to coast

And nobody talks to a host that's close,

Unless the host that isn't close

Is busy, hung, or dead.

I would also like this new signal to be supported:

SIGNUKE Nuclear event occurred (cannot be caught or ignored :-)

--Naim Abdullah

Dept. of EECS,

Northwestern University,

ihnp4!nucsrl!naim