'Gimme Gimme Gimme' Easter egg in 
man breaks automated tests at 00:30 The maintainer of the Linux manual program man has scrapped an "Easter egg" after it broke a user's automatic code tests. On Tuesday, Unix systems administrator Jaroslav Kucera wrote in a Stack Exchange post: "We've noticed that some of our automatic tests fail when they run at 00:30 but work fine the rest of the day. They …
why would an automated test want to run 'man' without any parameters
It didn't. The automated process mentioned in the article needed to run man -w to get the "man path".
As per the article,
When you run man without specifying the page or with -w, it outputs 'gimme gimme gimme' to stderr, but only at 00:30."
So, running man -w (a perfectly sensible thing to do to get the man path) triggered it, which led to the problem.
IMHO, if it outputed the easter egg only on a man invocation, it wouldn't have caused any such problem, and removing the easter egg altogether is unwarranted. Just don't make it work on man -w and make it work on man alone. My $0.02.
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"removing the easter egg altogether is unwarranted"
Its presence caused an error when another change was made. What other errors could it cause in the future? That seems a good reason to remove it. It's maybe not a huge increase in the attack area in comparison with other things but it's there.
I'm using FreeBSD and was hoping that this could have been triggered by a more commonly available joke. So I set out to investigate /usr/src/usr.bin/man, only to discover that /usr/bin/man on FreeBSD is only a shell script. Oh well, can't win 'm all ;)
I suppose I could always add this functionality myself if I really wanted to, but I think I'll pass.
> Like this?
..
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(media)#Software
Doesn't seem to mention the Easter egg in Windows 3.1, where a certain key sequence ( I have sadly forgotten which) popped up a window with rolling credits of the developers on a movie screen, with a figure standing next to it that most of the time looked like a cartoon Bill Gates, but occasionally the head was swapped to look like a bear. There must be some inside joke there...
I think a "credits" Eater egg like this quite justifiable, given the anonymity under which most developers labour. Might even pay for itself by boosting morale.
Many HP and TI calculators had hidden embedded mini-games. Likewise, many HP printers have "design team" type eggs as well as the normal test page. My HP 54600B Oscilloscope has tetris. My HP 54622D 'scope has Asteroids. My HP 54645D 'scope has the design team alongside a picture of a badger (!!), and also a game called BUGS! as well as a hidden hardware hacking menu.
Tektronix test equipment has all kinds of weird easter eggs. I had a logic analyzer with a pong game, and another with breakout. Both are long gone, and I don't remember the model numbers. My 2232 oscilloscope has a wizard riding a skateboard, and my 1751 digital 'scope can display fish swimming.
As I don't go out of my way to collect kit with eggs, I rather suspect that such distractions are quite common ... perhaps the rule rather than the exception. I even have a fscking coffeepot (Mr. Coffee PRX30) that'll display the designer's name, and has a hidden "diagnostic" mode that displays the temperature in degrees C. The mind boggles ...
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