NAME

       guru - System administration

SYNOPSIS

       guru [ -e program ] [ -f ] [ -p target ]

DESCRIPTION

       guru  is  a  sophisticated  program  synthesis and system maintenance tool developed after
       midnight in numerous university computing labs.  It is based on  the  famous  LISP  Hacker
       system,  used  to develop AI programs on TENEX.  guru reads a problem description from the
       standard input.  An innovative and occasionally correct solution is generated and  written
       to  the  standard  output.   Typically,  guru  is  invoked  repeatedly until an acceptable
       solution is generated or the user community has learned to live with the problem.

       The bugreport mechanism sometimes invokes guru.  In this case guru executes at a  priority
       inversely  proportional  to  the reported urgency of the bug.  Feature enhancements run at
       high priority whereas critical problems are fixed only when the machine would otherwise be
       idle.

       If the standard input is empty, guru uses its program synthesis capabilities to generate a
       selection of screen editors,  X  widgets,  compilers,  sundry  games  and  the  occasional
       diatribe.

OPTIONS

       -e program
               New  features  are  added to an existing program.  This option should be used with
               caution as the enhanced program may behave unpredictably or not at all.

       -f      Reconstructs filesystems after a crash.

       -p target
               Ports the entire system on which guru is executing to target,  preferably  a  RISC
               machine.   This  is an extremely time consuming operation and is not guaranteed to
               terminate.

       If more than one option is specified, guru may thrash.  Each copy of guru has its own  set
       of unique, additional and undocumented options.

SEE ALSO

       YAPS: Yet another Program Synthesiser by S C Johnson.

NOTES

       Inherent  design  limitations  prevent  guru  from  synthesising  comments.   The programs
       generated are undocumented.  The lucidity,  politeness,  relevance  and  language  of  the
       occasional diatribe vary considerably.

       The  only  diagnostic is an occasional ``I deserve a raise'' - which may be ignored albeit
       doing so may provoke ``I resign'' - an unrecoverable error.

       Sending the output of one guru into another can produce quite startling results.