838: Incident

|< < Prev Comic #838 (December 24, 2010) Next > >|

Incident

Title text: He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he's copied on /var/spool/mail/root, so be good for goodness' sake.

Explanation

This comic was fittingly posted on Christmas Eve in the United States. Christmas is a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25.

In this comic, Rob is on a Linux computer and tried to change his user account from his normal access to the access of a super user by using the command "sudo su". Sudo is a famous phrase in xkcd lore, made famous by comic 149: Sandwich. When Rob is unable to use "sudo" because his account is not authorized, the system says that the incident "will be reported".

In the comic, sudo and the system report the incidents to Santa Claus, who in Christmas lore makes a list of who is naughty and who is nice. If you are nice, you get presents, if you are naughty, you get a lump of coal. When sudo reports to Santa that Rob's account is not authorized, he puts Rob on the naughty list.

In the image text, which is a parody of the famous Christmas song, "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town", /var/spool/mail/root is the root/superuser Inbox on a Linux system.

Transcript

[Rob is sitting at a computer. The computer's prompt is shown.]

robm@homebox~$ sudo su

Password:

robm is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

robm@homebox~$

[A second person approaches.]

Rob: Hey -- who does sudo report these "incidents" to?

Second person: You know, I've never checked.

[Santa Claus is sitting at a desk supported by candy canes, with a red monitor. On the wall are two lists labeled 'naughty' and 'nice'. He is adding a name to the 'naughty' list.]

 add a comment! ⋅  add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅  refresh comments!

Discussion

And so the entire list of naughty and nice children fits into a single A1 poster by Santa's computer. Davidy²²[talk] 09:59, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Presumably it's a delta encoding; he writes down changes to the lists and then later writes them into his records and gets a new poster. 130.160.145.224 16:19, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

---

Seeing as the username is robm, should this be attributed to Rob and not Cueball? Mark Hurd (talk) 16:27, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Yup, changed that. Xyz (talk) 14:32, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

---

Real Linux does say "this incident will be reported," but does *NOT* report it to Santa Claus. Xyz (talk) 14:49, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Actually the title text kind of explains this! The incident is reported to root, by email (by default, anyway). So if Santa is somehow "copied" there, he will see the message. Durka42 (talk) 08:11, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

This is like asking is a tree falls in the forest and it is not heard by anyone does it make a sound. Just because an email is sent to an email mailbox doesn't meant that the message is ever read. Saying that Santa will see this message if it is sent to a mailbox which is supposedly his, does not mean that anyone ever sees it. --108.162.212.161 17:50, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

---

So all we need now is an Ubuntu distro that reports failed sudo attempts to Santa Claus. Santabuntu anyone?

Zyxuvius (talk) 05:37, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Sources of inspiration

Perhaps this could be cited as a possible source of inspiration? http://toblender.com/this-incident-will-be-reported/ 108.162.219.143 13:09, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

---

“While Christmas is principally a Christian reimagining of a Pagan holiday”– this is an entirely irrelevant detour. I’m not even convinced the tradition of delivering gifts is necessary to explain (all the comic requires to understand is the nice/naughty list), certainly not as the first part of the explanation. --162.158.114.40 10:19, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

---

Technically, Rob’s computer could be running any Unix-like system, not necessarily Linux, right? The current maintainer of sudo is an OpenBSD developer. --162.158.114.40 10:19, 3 January 2018 (UTC)