NAME¶
guru - System administration
SYNOPSIS¶
guru [
-e program ] [
-f ] [
-p target
]
DESCRIPTION¶
guru is a sophisticated program synthesis and system maintenance tool developed
after midnight in numerous university computing labs. It is based on the
famous LISP Hacker system, used to develop AI programs on TENEX. guru reads a
problem description from the standard input. An innovative and occasionally
correct solution is generated and written to the standard output. Typically,
guru is invoked repeatedly until an acceptable solution is generated or the
user community has learned to live with the problem.
The bugreport mechanism sometimes invokes guru. In this case guru executes at a
priority inversely proportional to the reported urgency of the bug. Feature
enhancements run at high priority whereas critical problems are fixed only
when the machine would otherwise be idle.
If the standard input is empty, guru uses its program synthesis capabilities to
generate a selection of screen editors, X widgets, compilers, sundry games and
the occasional diatribe.
OPTIONS¶
- -e program
- New features are added to an existing program. This option
should be used with caution as the enhanced program may behave
unpredictably or not at all.
- -f
- Reconstructs filesystems after a crash.
- -p target
- Ports the entire system on which guru is executing to
target, preferably a RISC machine. This is an extremely time consuming
operation and is not guaranteed to terminate.
If more than one option is specified, guru may thrash. Each copy of guru has its
own set of unique, additional and undocumented options.
SEE ALSO¶
YAPS: Yet another Program Synthesiser by S C Johnson.
NOTES¶
Inherent design limitations prevent guru from synthesising comments. The
programs generated are undocumented. The lucidity, politeness, relevance and
language of the occasional diatribe vary considerably.
The only diagnostic is an occasional ``I deserve a raise'' - which may be
ignored albeit doing so may provoke ``I resign'' - an unrecoverable error.
Sending the output of one guru into another can produce quite startling
results.