foo / bar ???

[dunstq]

This might be the most stupid post ever in this forum. Well, in man pages you often come across example file names called "foo" and "bar" which made me wonder where this comes from. Actually I once used a media player on Windows called "foobar2000" and thought that the name is quite stupid but as I saw these "words" everywhere on man pages it confused me a bit...

[Harryc]

:)......

http://sa.dartmouth.edu/twiki/bin/view/Linux/FooBar

[pigpen]

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FooBar
and of course:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/foo.html

[jon1012]

Wow... what an history for just two words... lol ;)
(May be interesting to see the history of lorem ipsum dolor si amet, etc...)

[awillard69]

Based on the military origins, the logical progression is something like:

SNAFU -> TARFU -> FUBAR

I suppose the early writers of man pages and such thought it entertaining.

[senderap]

My translation

foobar = FUBAR = ****ed Up Beyond All Recognition :)

[tashirosgt]

So many Unix/Linux commands are short words, it's confusing to beginners to have documentation that uses "foo" and "bar" as meaning "an arbitrary name". (Has any malicious software writer ever used "foo" as a keyword that had to appear in some command or configuration file, verbatim? ) Even when you become an insider it is often hard to remember such examples because "foo" is an example of a file one place an a device another place and a socket another place. I'm happy when I see documentation without any foo's and bar's. There's no need to keep exhibiting fossilized slang from the 50's.

This is the Chat forum isn't it? No? Sorry!

[jcstille]

Thread moved....

Any CSC person will be introduced to this very early. So get used to it. Then all the other people can look at you funny.

[Jman]

It's the programmer's version of the mathematician's x. It could be anything. And since the programmers wrote documentation, they used their variables in it. Yes this gets confusing which is why it's probably a good idea to have a non programmer write the documentation.

There is a bit of a history beheind it though, so it's kind of an inside joke.

There are more of these (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/metasyntactic-variable.html). I kind of like spam and eggs. :)

[dunstq]

Thanks for all your answers - very amusing, indeed!

[rogue]

There's also an April 1st RFC on the Etymology of "Foo" (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3092.txt). :)

[Uhlix]

My translation

foobar = FUBAR = ****ed Up Beyond All Recognition :)

second that