Thanks to gls@hrmso.att.com for sending me a copy of this.
Since it's 5 years old, many of you probably haven't seen it before.

>From rocksanne!rochester!seismo!lll-crg!lll-lcc!qantel!ihnp4!chinet!nucsrl!naim Tue Sep 16 01:45:44 1986
Path: sunybcs!rocksanne!rochester!seismo!lll-crg!lll-lcc!qantel!ihnp4!chinet!nucsrl!naim
From: naim@nucsrl.UUCP (Naim Abdullah)
Newsgroups: net.jokes
Subject: errno(2) codes
Message-ID: <1110002@nucsrl.UUCP>
Date: 16 Sep 86 05:45:44 GMT
Organization: Northwestern University
Lines: 54

The following was sent to me by a friend who was working at HP during
the summer. I am posting it here for the people who missed  the
USENIX conference and who don't get the HP newsgroups.

==============================================================================

At the USENIX Association conference in Atlanta recently a contest was
held to invent the most humorous/bizarre/etc UN*X error message of the
errno(2) 'EERROR' type.  This contest had been tried at an earlier European
Users Group meeting, where the winning entry was:

ENOTOBACCO		Read on an empty pipe

You get the idea.  A partial [alphabetized] list of 'top(?)' entries from
Atlanta [and from several readers of hp.unix] follows;  if your pun/wierdness
tolerance is low, you may want to abandon ship:

EBEFOREI		Invalid syntax
ECHERNOBYL		Core dumped
ECRAY			Program exited before being run
EDINGDONG		The daemon is dead
EFLAT			System needs tuning
EGEEK			Program written by inept Frat member
EIEIO			Here-a-bug, there-a-bug, ....
EIUD			Missing period
ELECTROLUX		Your code could stand to be cleaned up
EMILYPOST		Wrong fork
END.ARMS.CONTROL	Silo overflow
ENOHORSE		Mount failed
ENONSEQUETOR		C program not derived from
				main(){printf("Hello, world");}
EWATERGATE		Extended tape gap
EWOK			Aliens sighted
EWOK			Your code appears to have been stir-fried
EWOULDBNICE     	The feature you want has not been implemented yet

And finally, a sort-of 'period piece':

EMR.ED			A host is a host,
			From coast to coast
			And nobody talks to a host that's close,
			Unless the host that isn't close
			Is busy, hung, or dead.

I would also like this new signal to be supported:

SIGNUKE         Nuclear event occurred (cannot be caught or ignored :-)

======================================================================

				 Naim Abdullah
				 Dept. of EECS,
				 Northwestern University,
				 ihnp4!nucsrl!naim
--
David J. MacKenzie