[Unix] On-line acronym for `Use the
Source, Luke' (a pun on Obi-Wan Kenobi's "Use the Force, Luke!"
in "Star Wars") -- analogous to RTFS (sense 1), but more
polite. This is a common way of suggesting that someone would be
better off reading the source code that supports whatever feature
is causing confusion, rather than making yet another futile pass
through the manuals, or broadcasting questions on Usenet that
haven't attracted wizards to answer them.
Once upon a time in elder days, everyone running Unix had
source. After 1978, AT&T's policy tightened up, so this
objurgation was in theory appropriately directed only at associates
of some outfit with a Unix source license. In practice, bootlegs
of Unix source code (made precisely for reference purposes) were so
ubiquitous that one could utter it at almost anyone on the network
without concern.
Nowadays, free Unix clones have become widely enough distributed
that anyone can read source legally. The most widely distributed
is certainly Linux, with variants of the NET/2 and 4.4BSD
distributions running second. Cheap commercial Unixes with source
such as BSD/OS are accelerating this trend.
Unix /yoo'niks/ n.
[In the authors' words, "A weak pun
on Multic very early on it was `UNICS'] (also `UNIX') An
interactive time-sharing system invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson
after Bell Labs left the Multics project, originally so he could
play games on his scavenged PDP-7....
