This Prank Is In A Cat-egory All Its Own

Several years ago, I was joking with my coworker about a very basic program used in Linux called “Cat,” which would print out the content of a file. I threatened to “hack” onto his machine — not hard since I had already been granted full privileges on it as part of my job — and replace his “Cat” program with one that simply printed out “meow” when run.

Later that day, every one of my actual tasks was blocked in one way or another waiting for people to get back to me, so I had nothing productive to do, but I wanted to at least appear busy until someone responded to me. I actually started playing around and spent a few minutes writing a bit smarter version of my threatened cat program. Then, one of my peers responded to my message and I got back to work, completely forgetting the program.

A full two years later I went to “Cat” a file on my machine and the actual contents of the file were surrounded by meows. Confused, I dug into figuring out the cause of the meows only to find out that I had accidentally left my joke program in place of the real “Cat” program all those years ago. I hadn’t noticed it for this long because I’d written the program to function identical to the real “Cat” program 359 days of the year. But if the calendar date was just right, it would switch over to my joke version.

Thus, I managed to successfully play my first ever April Fools joke… on myself.