I really like picking up arcane UNIX/Linux knowledge. In the 90s, I was asked in an interview by a wizened old UNIX greybeard what the brk system call did, and what I would think if I saw it pop up frequently in the strace output of a program I was trying to diagnose. I did not then know the answer to that question, and I subsequently bombed the rest of that interview. If I would have read this article I could have told him stood for "program break" and mentioned that it was an end-of-heap marker, and that I should expect that the program was calling malloc (which was then implemented with brk) a lot. I probably would have still bombed the other interviews, but I could have at least momentarily impressed the crusty old sysadmin.

Nowadays however, interviewers are rarely impressed with what arcane knowledge you may or may not have, regardless of how hard won the experiences were that taught it to you.

I was reminded of this when reading the "Demystifying the shebang" article today on HN when I saw it in some strace output, which along with the other similarities got me to thinking about this article.