If you’re not disgusted by the thought of piping things in to or out of a cat…

You might be a Unix Geek.

If you commonly instruct people to ask “Your friend, Manuel”…

You might be a Unix Geek.

If naming software projects using a recursive acronym really trips your trigger…

You might be a Unix Geek.

Related: if you’ve ever laughed out loud at a joke which requires a thorough understanding and deep appreciation of the concept of recursion…

You might be a Unix Geek.

If you’ve long since forgotten that your coffee mug has vi commands on it…

this is not my wife's favorite coffee mug

You might be a Unix Geek.

If you maintain an SSH link to you parents’ home network…

You might be a Unix Geek.

If you own a t-shirt that says “No, I won’t fix your computer”, but you can’t find it anymore…

You might be a Unix Geek.

If you’re judging me because the actual shirt says “No, I will not fix your computer” and you know that for a fact because you’re wearing it right now…

You might be a Unix Geek and a pedant. ;)

If your preferred Twitter client has a command line interface…

You might be a Unix Geek.

If you have to constantly remind yourself that RTFM is not a socially acceptable answer…

rtfm

You might be a Unix Geek.

If you’ve ever lectured somebody on the virtues of considering everything as a file…

You might be a Unix Geek.

If the phrase “less is more” invokes your thoughts on the pros and cons of different text pagers…

You might be a Unix Geek.

If you can enumerate the differences between OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD…

You might be a Unix Geek.

If “tar czvf” makes any sense to you at all…

You might be a Unix Geek.

If you’ve ever made one of your friends telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl…

You might be a Unix Geek.

If you have “emacs rules” tattooed across your fingers…

What's the one about emacs and how many fingers you need to use it?

You might be a Unix Geek. And a mutant.

If you have a server in your employ with more than 3 years of uptime…

You might be a Unix Geek.

If your notes, to-dos, grocery list, essays, and email are all stored as plain text…

You might be a Unix Geek.

And finally…

If while reading this you felt compelled to point out that most of these jokes don’t relate directly to Unix, but instead to ‘Unix-like’ derivatives such as Linux and associated software such as the suite of Gnu utilities which, for my information, are expressly NOT Unix even in their very name…

Congratulations, you’re a HUGE Unix Geek! ;)


Surely I’m neither the funniest nor the biggest Unix Geek in the room. Please, add your own in the comments or tweet them to me and I’ll post them here!