Saturday, July 19, 2014

When Jesus Meets Unix

I saw this bumper sticker on a car as we were passing through Bend.  It's a bit out of focus, but all the cars were moving...  It took a minute to figure out its meaning.  For those who don't write Unix shell scripts, HE>i orders Unix to execute a program named HE, and to write standard output into a file name i.  Because it is > not >>, it does not append the output to file i, but completely replaces its existing contents.

I'm pretty sure that this is a Christian Unix user explaining that the Holy Spirit has (or at least, is) replacing his human nature with something less sinful.  The alternative is that some Unix user is really, really confused about where to enter commands.


8 comments:

  1. Or, could just be math. (">" meaning "greater than")

    With, I suspect, the same Christian motivation.

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  2. Clayton, you know too much. The sticker says

    HE is greater than I.

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  3. Google sez this is the logo of hegreaterthani.com, a clothing store in Haleiwa HI, also in Honolulu and Newport Beach CA.‎

    The proprietors are evangelical Christians. "Our mission is to celebrate God's greatness by creating quality products..." with "HE>i" on them. T-shirts, shorts, caps, sunglasses, tote bags, stickers. It's an allusion to John 3:30.

    As a religious sentiment, it seems rather pointless to me. "God is greater than I am." Well, yeah, and it gets dark at night.

    But the owners consider it highly significant, and have created a business around it that has lasted over 10 years.

    Incidentally, it could be a Moslem sentiment: Allahu akbar is Arabic for "God is great.'

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  4. It's an on-line store, http://hegreaterthani.com. It has a Christian overtone. The name comes from john 3:30.

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  5. Man ... people just don't get gentle sarcasm so much, do they?

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  6. Thank you for that Clayton.

    I really needed to see that tonight.

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  7. That's definitely much more geeky than "Jesus saves...but Jesus also creates a backup."

    And more on-point.

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