From a glorious reddit post on r/ucla
I was sitting in the hot, steamy room of Franz 1178 carefully reading each and every exam problem, then searching through my slide print-outs for the closest match and then just writing it down and hoping for the best, when all of a sudden I stumbled upon the question: "was bing banned in China?"
I remembered the wise words that my TA once told me:
"Bing was never banned in China. Naive undergrad. Rent a virtual machine and check."
That's when I realized, the exam was a test all along. And I had managed to crack the code. I had to rent a lnxsrv and check. Under my breath, I muttered the words export PATH=/usr/local/cs/bin:$PATH, and then the following:
cat ~eggert/finalexamanswerkey.txt | less
Suddenly, chilling wind brushed over my back.
After one and a half hours, they had finally managed to turn on the AC in the lecture hall.
I cautiously read through the answer key, slowly copying down the right answers onto my long, thick answer sheet when I hear Eggert scream C-s Student Who Is Cheating Off The Answer Key in his native emacs tongue. I was in total shock. Shivering, I looked down at the front of the classroom, and watched as Eggert slowly turned his head until it locked onto me. "I will pkill you," he echoed. I was frozen at my desk and could only watch as he summoned his stand [BIRTHPLACE OF THE INTERNET].
I boelted from my seat, jumping over several unlucky students' desks and sprinting up the stairs and out of Franz into the Court of Sciences. But I could sense that Eggert was close on my tail. He summoned a dozen copies of himself with calls to pthread_create(), and they proceeded to chase me as I ran towards the mathsci building. I hastily grabbed the door to enter mathsci, when one of the Eggert threads shouted "chmod a-x MATHSCI DOOR." I tried opening the door, but it shouted at me: "Permission denied." I said "rm -f door" and ran into the mathsci building.
I ran desperately from the Eggert clones, but soon found myself out of breath, because I'm a CS major and I sit at my desk all day. Suddenly, I saw one of Eggert's clones run down the hallway. I quickly opened the door next to me and stepped inside, breathing a sigh of relief. But then I turned myself around and screamed.
"Welcome to my office." Eggert echoed. "You've made it so far. I can tell that you have a good grasp of the fundamentals of commonly-used software tools and environments, particularly open-source tools likely to be used in upper-division computer science courses."
I whimpered and backed into the corner of his office.
"You may be wondering how you got here. I created a symbolic link between mathsci 6229 and my office here in Engineering VI. I want you to know that I won't hurt you. I was merely testing you."
I gulped and looked into his eyes. "Really?"
"Yes..." Eggert replied, "In fact, I brought you here into my office to ask you one very important question."
"What?" I stuttered.
Eggert leaned back in his chair, smiling. "You see, for the past several years I have been building up a team of highly capable individuals, ones that can anticipate foreign cybersecurity threats from places such as USC and stop them. I use the class CS35L in order to sort through all of UCLA's undergraduate CS students, and find the ones with the potential to join this league of cyber heroes."
"That's... That's impossible..." I said.
"You probably haven't realized it yet," Eggert explained, "but while running away from me you were able to utilize a multitude of linux commands in order to escape my wrath. Do you understand what that means?"
"Uh...." I said, realizing it was quite strange I was able to verbally incantate gnu coreutils, "y-yeah, I guess...?"
Eggert gazed so deeply into my soul I felt as if he had run the command top on my internal organs. "Join me, and together we will curve down the world."