1. apt-get moo
$ apt moo
(__)
(oo)
/------\/
/ | ||
* /\---/\
..."Have you mooed today?"...Same goes on apt moo.
The Easter egg is not described in man page of apt, of course.
2. Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30?
Developers put an Easter egg respecting Abba’s song "Gimme gimme gimme (A Man After Midnight)". Invoke man -w at 00:30 will print gimme gimme gimme to standard error.
er, that was my fault, I suggested it. Sorry.
Pretty much the whole story is in the commit. The maintainer of man is a good friend of mine, and one day six years ago I jokingly said to him that if you invoke man after midnight it should print "gimme gimme gimme", because of the Abba song called "Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight":
Well, he did actually put it in. A few people were amused to discover it, and we mostly forgot about it until today.
Sadly, developers removed the Easter egg after trending of the topic.
After some reflection, I’ve removed this Easter egg. It’ll be gone in the upcoming man-db 2.8.0.
I’m glad that it made some people smile, which after all was the whole purpose of it, and my Twitter notifications and so on today suggest that most people thought it was more amusing than annoying. Still, some people did find it annoying, and six years seems like a pretty good run for that sort of thing; it probably isn’t going to get significantly better exposure than it already unexpectedly has by way of this question. Time to put it to bed.