Nightmare on Linux St

I have been having a recurring nightmare involving TUX the penguin. Now If you 

don’t know TUX look him up Google is a wonder!

Okay, now you think this woman is crazy, how could she be having a nightmare 

involving this sweet little guy! Now, if you have had coding experience in BASH, show

of hands, I bet he’s visited your dreams, especially in college. I was dreaming I was 

coding, kept getting an error, and just like the Freddy Krueger movies from the ’80s, 

out came Tux the penguin! Yelling at me, taunting me.

Tux waddled toward me with that permanent little smile on his face, but somehow it

wasn’t cute anymore.

“Line 47,” he said.

“What about line 47?” I asked.

He just pointed a flipper at my screen.

I looked. Nothing seemed wrong.

“It’s perfectly fine!”

Tux shook his head.

“No. It’s almost fine.”

And then he vanished.

Suddenly, my terminal window stretched across the horizon like some weird digital 

desert. Error messages floated through the sky.

Permission denied.

Syntax error.

Unexpected token.

The dreaded words appeared in giant red letters:

Segmentation fault. “I’M NOT EVEN USING C!” I screamed.

From somewhere in the distance, Tux’s laughter echoed.

I started running. Every few feet I passed giant stacks of documentation. Thousands 

and thousands of pages. I grabbed one.

The answer had to be in there somewhere.

I flipped to the index.

“See Error.”

I looked up Error.

“See Documentation.”

I looked up Documentation.

“See Error.”

Tux appeared beside me carrying a cup of coffee.

“You know,” he said, “if you had read the manual…”

“No one reads the manual!”

The look of disappointment on his face hurt more than the nightmare.

I kept digging through files, opening directories.

project_final

project_final_fixed

project_final_really_fixed

project_final_final

project_final_final2

project_final_final2_ACTUAL

Somewhere in there was the answer.

Then I found it.

A script.

The script. The one causing all the trouble.

With trembling hands I opened it.

There, nestled between hundreds of perfectly normal lines of code, was a single 

typo.

One missing semicolon.

One missing character.

One tiny mistake.

I laughed. I cried. I reached for the keyboard.

At last, I would fix everything.

But before I could type, Tux slammed the laptop shut.

“Wait,” he said.

“What now?!”

He pointed behind me.

Slowly, I turned around.

A new terminal window opened.

It contained only one line:

sudo rm -rf /

And beneath it was a blinking cursor.

Tux smiled.

“Go ahead,” he whispered.

Then I woke up in a cold sweat, immediately checking every Linux machine in my 

house to make sure Dream-Me hadn’t somehow found a way to execute commands 

in the real world.

To this day, I still don’t know whether Tux was trying to teach me a lesson or simply 

enjoying my suffering.

Either way, every time I open a terminal and everything works on the first try, I look 

over my shoulder. Just in case.