Mac OS X Easter Egg - Kill Gates

in Tiger, it says "Bash Gates?" (as in bash his head in...)

Neat as it is, it's not intentional. Most *nix shells (like MacOS's Terminal) will attempt to match up any spelling mistake with a known command. "kill" is a Unix command, therefore "bill" is taken as a misspelled "kill". It asks you to verify this - therefore "bill gates" is translated as "kill gates?" Still, the sentiment is nice...

this is not an egg. any first word in the terminal with the letts "ill" is taken as the kill command in unix. sorry try again

The terminal perfoms a spell check on commands. There is no "bill" command, so "kill" is the closest spelling. This isn't an intentional egg when mixed with "gates"

How silly. For that matter, if you type at the prompt, "jobs steve" you get: Usage: jobs [ -l ]. And upon taking this advice and typing "jobs -l steve" you get: jobs: Too many arguments. I wonder what Apple is trying to tell us.

Sorry to disappoint you, but the response "jobs: too many arguments" has got to be a simple coincidence. Either "jobs" is a command in the Terminal, or it has simply been interpreted as one, by the aforementioned SpellChecker. The reason for the "arguments" part just happens to fit in perfectly when talking about Unix, Telnet, etc. terminology - by typing "jobs -1 steve", the program/server misread it, and "believed" that you had entered the "job" command, followed by two arguments, "-1" and "steve". This must be, apparently, an illegal number, which is why you received the error message, stating that you had entered too many of them.

This does not work in Mac OS X Jaguar. They must've somehow taken it out because people thought that Apple put it in there on purpose.

This behavior hasn't disappeared completely, nor is it unique to Mac OS X. In Mac OS X versions prior to 10.2 (Jaguar), Apple shipped the system with the Tenex C Shell (tcsh) as the default shell. This particular shell can be made to correct the spelling of command names by using the command 'set correct=all'. After using that command, the shell will respond to 'bill gates' with 'CORRECT>kill gates (y|n|e|a)?' This works for any UNIX-like operating system with tcsh. Mac OS X 10.2 and later releases ship with the GNU Bourne-Again Shell (bash) as the default shell. Although bash is the default, you can still get to tcsh by running the 'tcsh' command within bash, or by using NetInfo Manager to make it your preferred shell.

This is nonsense; Unix shells don't do spell checking (except maybe zsh...), and the command "kill gates" just results in "bash: kill: gates: no such pid".

In the original version of tcsh, typing "Bill Gates" makes tcsh think you meant "kill gates", and it will display: $ Bill Gates correct> kill Gates (y|e|n|a) It seems like Apple Inc. then thought of this joke, modified the source code of tcsh to make it display: $ Bill Gates OK? Kill Gates? Then they recompiled their version of tcsh with the joke and that version shipped with Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1 However, it was removed in Mac OS X 10.2

brittany$ bill gates -bash: bill: command not found