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Your sysop recently quit due to what the law division calls "internal struggles". Less fancily, he hated you, and he hated his job. As a parting gift, he left you a program entitled SwanSong.c. Being curious and slightly daft, you of course decide to execute it. Your console immediately floods with errors to standard error output:

stderr
------
Line 4: Cannot exec a shared library directly.  
Line 5: Link has been severed.  
Line 5: Attempting to link in too many shared libraries.  
Line 7: Srmount error.  
Line 8: Too many users.  
Line 9: Name not unique on network.  
Line 14: RFS specific error.  
Line 18: Remote address changed.  
Line 18: Interrupted system call should be restarted.  
Line 18: Socket operation on non-socket.

What does your sysop's swan song mean?

Footnote: Bonus points if you can write a program that returns this output. I'm pretty sure it's not possible, and it's definitely not a requirement to solve the problem.

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  • 8
    $\begingroup$ The bonus is easy... print "Cannot exec a shared library directly" ... ;) $\endgroup$ – user20 Aug 28 '15 at 16:43
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    $\begingroup$ @Emrakul ah, yes, the old "hard-coded error messages" - I know thee well. :) $\endgroup$ – Bailey M Aug 28 '15 at 16:44
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    $\begingroup$ Are you sure these write to stdout and not stderr? $\endgroup$ – Ian MacDonald Aug 28 '15 at 17:55
  • $\begingroup$ @IanMacDonald nope, not sure at all. In fact, they probably do print to stderr. It's not super relevant to the puzzle itself though. $\endgroup$ – Bailey M Aug 28 '15 at 18:01
  • $\begingroup$ Could probably leverage this answer to get you to an executable that would output these error codes... however, you may want to do this on a machine you don't care about (like an easily-reflashable Raspberry Pi or something), just in case. $\endgroup$ – Ian MacDonald Aug 28 '15 at 18:10
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These are Linux error messages, which can be looked up here: http://www.ioplex.com/~miallen/errcmp.html

83 (ELIBEXEC): Cannot exec a shared library directly
67 (ENOLINK): Link has been severed
82 (ELIBMAX): Attempting to link in too many shared libraries
69 (ESRMNT): Srmount error
87 (EUSERS): Too many users
76 (ENOTUNIQ): Name not unique on network
73 (EDOTDOT): RFS specific error
78 (EREMCHG): Remote address changed
85 (ERESTART): Interrupted system call should be restarted
88 (ENOTSOCK): Socket operation on non-socket

Convert the error numbers to ASCII to get the message:

SCREWLINUX

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  • $\begingroup$ Correctamundo. You get a fun little easter egg if you try to interpret this by line numbers instead, by the way. :) $\endgroup$ – Bailey M Aug 28 '15 at 18:01
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    $\begingroup$ Amusingly, I'm pretty sure some of these errors can never reasonably happen on Linux; ESRMNT and EDOTDOT seem to be Solaris-specific. Possibly the only reason they even exist is because Solaris has Linux binary compatibility, so a Linux app might on rare occasion encounter an error generated by the Solaris kernel :) $\endgroup$ – hobbs Aug 29 '15 at 4:51
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For your bonus points, here's a (rather contrived) Perl program that will produce the desired output:

#!/usr/bin/perl
sub ugh { $! = vec "SCREWLINUX", $x++, 8; warn "Line " . (caller)[2] . ": $!\n" }

ugh;
ugh ugh;

ugh;
ugh;
ugh;




ugh;



ugh ugh ugh;
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  • 4
    $\begingroup$ +1 For making me laugh with all the ughs. Certainly the response I'd get out of a stream of errors that made no sense. $\endgroup$ – Kingrames Aug 28 '15 at 20:26

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