838: Incident

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Incident

Title text: He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he's copied on /var/spool/mail/root, so be good for goodness' sake.

Explanation

This comic was fittingly posted on Christmas Eve in the United States. Christmas is a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Christ on December 25.

In this comic, Rob is on a Linux computer and tried to change his user account from his normal access to the access of a super user by using the command "sudo su". Sudo is a famous phrase in xkcd lore, made famous by comic 149: Sandwich. When Rob is unable to use "sudo" because his account is not authorized, the system says that the incident "will be reported".

In the comic, sudo and the system report the incidents to Santa Claus, who in Christmas lore makes a list of who is naughty and who is nice. If you are nice, you get presents, if you are naughty, you get a lump of coal. When sudo reports to Santa that Rob's account is not authorized, he puts Rob on the naughty list.

In the image text, which is a parody of the famous Christmas song, "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town", /var/spool/mail/root is the root/superuser Inbox on a Linux system.

Transcript

[Rob is sitting at a computer. The computer's prompt is shown.]

robm@homebox~$ sudo su

Password:

robm is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

robm@homebox~$

[A second person approaches.]

Rob: Hey -- who does sudo report these "incidents" to?

Second person: You know, I've never checked.

[Santa Claus is sitting at a desk supported by candy canes, with a red monitor. On the wall are two lists labeled 'naughty' and 'nice'. He is adding a name to the 'naughty' list.]

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Discussion

And so the entire list of naughty and nice children fits into a single A1 poster by Santa's computer. Davidy²²[talk] 09:59, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Presumably it's a delta encoding; he writes down changes to the lists and then later writes them into his records and gets a new poster. 130.160.145.224 16:19, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

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Seeing as the username is robm, should this be attributed to Rob and not Cueball? Mark Hurd (talk) 16:27, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Yup, changed that. Xyz (talk) 14:32, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

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Real Linux does say "this incident will be reported," but does *NOT* report it to Santa Claus. Xyz (talk) 14:49, 14 May 2013 (UTC)