Given that this is a monastery and all, it would have been nice if I'd been able to come up with a meditation titled "Perl Eschatology", but I'll have to settle for "Perl Scatology."

Flipping through the pages of one of my favorite Perl scriptures, the exalted Perl Cookbook, I chanced upon a disgusting little joke I had not noticed before. On recipe 17.20 Program: backsniff, p. 713 (3d ed.), the following logfile entry is shown:

May 25 15:50:22 coprolith sniffer: Connection from 207.46.131.141 to 207.46.130.164:echo

Here "coprolith" is the name of some server (coprolith.frii.com, to be more precise). As it turns out the same server makes other cameo appearances throughout the book (e.g. in the e-mail address gnat@coprolith.frii.com). The juxtaposition with the word "sniffer" makes it pretty clear that this was meant as a joke.

Or rather, a crypto-joke. After some Googling I can say that the joke went, if not unnoticed, at least unremarked upon.

I wonder if the editors of O'Reilly were/are in on the joke. I also wonder if FRII ever had a server in their domain with the name "coprolith."

I suppose this belongs in the annals of Perl Humor.

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