The One with the Thoughts of Frans

A while back a typo evaded me. GNU Tar is a utility originally conceived for writing (t)ape (ar)chives, a type of backup, whereas GUN Tar presumably doesn’t exist. Even if it did, it wouldn’t have anything to do with the GNU part of the equation.

Curious about the prevalence of this typo, I quickly found some unrelated but very interesting pictures. A guntar is a a combination of a gun and a guitar — obviously. 😉

Btw, there’s a picture of a guntar here (via)

Here’s a random video of Frank Klepacki playing some songs from Red Alert on his “Vengeance” guitar. I’m not really into guitars, but they can be quite interesting visually.

The typo itself is actually surprisingly rare. I searched for "gun tar" -guns -military -shot -shoot -shooting -foam but it’s still showing a lot of noise. Only one result was about GNU Tar, namely and embarrassingly, the typo made it into a published book: Utilizing Open Source Tools for Online Teaching and Learning: Applying Linux. Adding an extract at the end, i.e., "gun tar" -guns -military -shot -shoot -shooting -foam extract greatly improves on the ratio of typo results.