A *non-harmful* prank that I pulled on a linux Desktop:

touch /bi2 /tm2 /sbi2 /us2 /usr/loca2 /hom2 /roo2

So every time someone tried to use the <tab> key to fill in the path,.. It would never completely fill in the blank.

e.g.

instead of

Which, as a prank is pretty silly, yes. But, keep this in mind when you are navigating your system -- maybe its time to clean things up a bit.

Also, if you are making backups, instead of naming them blah.OLD, which will make the <tab> fillins awkward, maybe naming them BAK-blak.old will save you time.

just a thought.

One of my favorites is modifying someone's profile to have:
Years ago when I worked on DOS a co-worker claimed there was nothing I could do on DOS that he couldn't. I wrote a batch file called c1s.bat that set his prompt to "You can't find me". I then modified the standard autoexec.bat and replaced cls (clear screen) with c1s. (That is the original command had an el and the revised one that ran my bat file had a 1 but looked very similar.) He worked for hours trying to figure out what I had done. I finally took pity on him when he decided to reload the system from scratch.

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Nice. I'm going to keep that one in mind for some of my dev servers.

I know its an old one -- and is in Windows... but taking a screen shot of someone's desktop, then setting it as their wallpaper and disabling the taskbar is always fun.

That is an *absolute classic* and has provided me with no end of amusement over the years

Why can't this be done in Linux?

It's not really that useful because who is so lazy as to use Tab for 3 letter words ? I am not that lazy. Why would I type /us<Tab> instead of /usr ?

Setting PS1 to '#' is a classic trick ... "presto! I'm root!"

Still, the Linux crowd has a sick sense of humor sometimes. I am especially fond of the screen saver which generates about twenty different "the system just crashed" displays, entirely convincingly. (Even an Amiga 500 "Guru Meditation" is included ...)

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I am going to bookmark this thread for future reference.

I once rewrote a colleague's autoexec.bat (DOS 5.x with Windows 3.1) to call a file that echoed

"You are neglecting me. Defrag me now"

and then stopped with "pause."

She went up a tree and stayed there for half an hour.

Fortunately, she was and is a very nice person, or I wouldn't have lived to see the creation of Linux.

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Hi,

Posts have been extracted from this thread to: Professionalism & Gnu/Linux

I am extracting the posts to a new thread: Professionalism & Gnu/Linux. So if you wish this thread ([SOLVED] Linux practical joke) to carry on then so be it. But if anyone provides a means that cause harm or violates LQ Rules in any sense then this thread: ([SOLVED] Linux practical joke) will be closed.

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