 This link captures the confusion about how to pronounce "fsck": https://lwn.net/Articles/190223/ Here's the truth. Ted Kowalski, username frodo, may he rest in peace, was the original author, just down the hall from my office in Murray Hill, and his name for the program had a 'u' where there is now an 's'. Management made him change it for distribution, but they couldn't make him change his pronunciation. 34 comments
 @robpike Quite fun that f-suck variant happened though, censor a word and another somewhat inappropriate one appears.
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17 Dec 2023 at 2:54 | Open on queer.hacktivis.me
@robpike oh man, all those mentions of Hans Reiser in the comments section have aged... interestingly.  @CatherineFlick I double-checked his Wikipedia article, and apparently the date of his wife's disappearance was in September 2006... 2 months after the comments about him here were made. @egallager yeah he was a piece of work at the time, I remember the flame wars! And then XFS came to Linux and (after a few teething problems) everyone breathed a sigh of relief  @CatherineFlick @egallager Unfortunately, he was widely understood online to be rage-prone before the murders happened—I was never a kernel guy but I still knew, for example. I don’t know if anyone closer to the kernel understood to what extent it happened offline, though.  @luis_in_brief @CatherineFlick @egallager I didn’t invite him to the file systems workshop because, basically, he was a creep. The event I specifically remember is going to a talk he gave about reiserfs that he illustrated with naked CGI women with code or tree bark for skin. Some didn’t have heads, others sat on weird… projections… No way I was spending two days in the same room as him  @egallager @robpike For a while there a few decades back, my “Bonnie” filesystem benchmark was fairly influential. The only member of the fs community that got in my face about their results was Reiser. Just awful. I *probably* wasn't at risk of death…    @robpike if your Lisp machine thinks its hard disk is corrupt or it can’t contact its fileserver, one of the running processes will be “File system fucked” a long tradition   @robpike frodo was my director at G for a brief while on GVC (the pre-cros vc appliance found in conference rooms for a while), It was such a trip telling him about our shiny new distro and then later about some challenges we had with zombie process cleanup and him saying out loud something like "how did we handle those... oh I know who to email." and getting clear answers the very next day. i find the pronunciation appropriate , because you call it on the command line when a disk is f*cked... @robpike That sidebar reads like a "know the slang your kids use" notice in an article warning parents about a "dangerous new youth trend" 😆  @robpike I'm collecting pronunciation guidelines of tech words in my page https://howdoisay.it, I'll add an entry for fsck! @urixturing @robpike Side note: gnu (the animal) may or may not have a silent g, so it may or may not sound the same as GNU, which never has a silent g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gnu   |
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