guru - System administration

guru [ -e program ] [ -f ] [ -p target ]

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.

-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.

YAPS: Yet another Program Synthesiser by S C Johnson.

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.