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Who Mom Likes

When you travel as much as I do, you have the opportunity- nay, the responsibility- to read man pages. While sharpening the saw, so-to-speak, on increasing my teaching skills, I came across the following command:

[Fri 08/01/11 06:05 MST][pts/1][x86_64/linux-gnu/2.6.22-14-generic][4.3.4]
<aaron@kratos:~>
zsh 31 % who am i
aaron    pts/1        2008-01-11 06:05 (:0.0)

Nothing special about that, but I thought to myself, "Are 'am' and 'i' really options to the 'who' command, or is it just one of those things?" So, i pulled up the man page on 'who'. Looking through the options, I don't see an 'am' or 'i' option. However, at the bottom of the man page, right before the AUTHOR section, the following paragraph is as follows:

       If FILE is not specified, use /var/run/utmp.  /var/log/wtmp as FILE  is
       common.   If  ARG1  ARG2  given, -m presumed: ‘am i’ or ‘mom likes’ are
       usual.

The '-m' option just means to print only the user and hostname associated with STDIN. However, the arguments 'mom' and 'likes' are also valid, instead of 'am' and 'i'. Are you serious?! So, from the terminal yet again, the following command is run:

[Fri 08/01/11 06:05 MST][pts/1][x86_64/linux-gnu/2.6.22-14-generic][4.3.4]
<aaron@kratos:~>
zsh 32 % who mom likes
aaron    pts/1        2008-01-11 06:05 (:0.0)

I always knew mom liked me best! 🙂

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