Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'(chiark.greenend.org.uk)

99 points by speckx 3 hours ago | 37 comments

jgrahamc 3 hours ago |

Wonderful!

At the bottom he notes: "I’m sitting in the UK as I write this. Under UK law, I believe this should constitute fair dealing: the purpose is quotation for criticism and review, and this single screen capture is in no way an alternative to paying to see the original film. The film comes from the USA, and under USA law I think it similarly constitutes fair use: it’s for non-profit educational purposes, the amount of the full work used is extremely small, and the effect on the value of the full work negligible."

I took down my entire "Behind The Screens" YouTube channel and transferred it to my own site: https://behind-the-screens.tv because of copyright notices from YouTube that were heavily skewed towards the studios and I didn't have the energy to fight what was clearly fair use in my videos.

socalgal2 16 minutes ago | |

Sure it sucks that you got takedown notices. Ideally it would have been revenue share. Your critique is mostly interesting because it's using famous IP. Critique something no one cares about to see how much your additions are adding vs the pull of the original content itself.

doublerabbit 2 hours ago | |

Thanks for that. A very entertaining watch.

xrd 1 hour ago | |

You really need to put this on an RSS feed! I wish there was a way you could get paid for views for this stuff. I will be sending people this link when they ask "why are you so mad about that terminal scene in that movie?!?!"

nickdichev 33 minutes ago | | |

The parent commentator is the former CTO of Cloudflare, I don't think he's worried about monetizing his passion project :)

AkBKukU 2 hours ago |

> Killing some processes to free up memory

This section is disregarding a key lore element, the inhabitants of the grid are programs. Killing a process in this context more likely has an interpretation of an attempt to stop an individual such as the villain Clu. I would say an alternative explanation is is more story based, with Kevin Flynn trying to stop Clu from the outside world but being unable to and instead taking the last resort of entering the grid when he knows it would be dangerous.

ksymph 42 minutes ago | |

That's a good idea, but remember that, up until CLU's outright betrayal, Kevin had no reason to be concerned, and after it, he had no way back into meat space to run those commands.

Also -- unrelated, but a nitpick of the article -- Kevin was using the laser to come and go from the grid for a while before he got stuck there. The laser would have been pretty well-tested by the time he made/edited the last will and testament, so the article's explanation that it was his first use of the tech doesn't make sense. (He could have just spontaneously decided to update it though, which isn't too far fetched)

s_dev 2 hours ago |

As an aside the Daft Punk soundtrack that accompanies this film is an absolute masterpiece. I think it's their best work.

It's such a shame the film doesn't live up to it's own soundtrack.

computerdork 1 hour ago | |

As someone in music, yeah, that was one of the best movie soundtrack’s of all time (not much like it in movies beforehand).

But kind of disagree about the film, think it was under appreciated. It isn’t a masterpiece, but the acting, the overall story, and the visuals were really good. And yeah, those dark Tron-visuals combined with the pulsing, digital daft-punk music really worked (at least for me), and when I want to get pulled into a different world, will rewatch that film.

copypaper 5 minutes ago | |

Tron 1 for the plot, Tron 2 for daft punk, Tron 3... we don't talk about.

MiguelVieira 25 minutes ago | |

I think of the film as a Daft Punk music video, and from that perspective it's great.

amysox 1 hour ago | |

People were calling the film "a two-hour Daft Punk video" at one point. Which would be pretty cool, come to think of it.

I do think they were a pretty good choice to follow on from the original movie's electronic score by Wendy Carlos.

debugnik 2 minutes ago | | |

Related, Interstella 5555 is actually Daft Punk's Discovery album as a one-hour animated movie.

Bender 1 hour ago | |

Listening to it now [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lILHEnz8fTk&list=PLO6S2qKFLc...

masfuerte 1 hour ago | |

The film looks great too. It was such a missed opportunity.

computerdork 1 hour ago | | |

Agreed, that dark tron world is visually super interesting.

bobanrocky 7 minutes ago |

Interesting indeed. The bit about Solaris -> Solar is nice/funny. I guess its an update to some system or kernel config file.

Or for super hacker points, edit appropriate binary using adb :)

scottlamb 2 hours ago |

    $ login -n root
    Login incorrect
    login: backdoor
    No home directory specified in password file!
    Logging in with home=/
    #

I think this is supposed to be something like CVE-1999-0113 (or its very recently discovered/disclosed friend CVE-2026-24061). It's the sort of thing you might just know off the top of your head that would be handy for getting into a computer that hasn't been updated in 20 years.

quelsolaar 1 hour ago |

I was luck to know Josh Nimoy who is responsible for a lot of this in the movie, who has since sadly passed away. Josh took great pride in the fact that he was able to put Emacs and a bunch of Unix commands in a major Hollywood blockbuster.ed

squigz 4 minutes ago | |

I'm unsure why the other comment is dead. You've seemingly deadnamed her and used the wrong pronouns.

agloe_dreams 2 hours ago |

The funny thing about all of this to me is that, compared to most 'hacking' scenes in movies, this bit is wildly realistic, almost too good. If they were like "run upload_me" we wouldn't even be talking about it.

Timwi 1 hour ago | |

I’ll quickly create a GUI interface using Visual Basic to track the killer’s IP address.

aquova 1 hour ago |

I have such a soft spot for this scene. I saw this movie in theaters when I was a high schooler, and this exact scene with Sam entering in commands piqued my curiosity to learn if it was a real thing. I eventually discovered that OS X came shipped with a bash terminal, and that I could manipulate a computer in just the same way. It really made an impact on me, which I certainly wasn't expecting when buying tickets to this film I knew nothing about.

kazinator 52 minutes ago |

The style of the desktop in the screenshot looks a lot like the XWindow manager twm:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twm

If you like that general esthetic, you can try that today in your GNU/Linux distro.

matthew_hre 1 hour ago |

This is something that really upset me going into Tron Ares. I had a blast rewatching Legacy beforehand and picking out somewhat realistic shell commands. Ares ditches a lot of these shell commands in favor of everything being a script. `./start_ares_program`, etc. IIRC, we still see a `systemctl` or two in the movie, but definitely less fun than Legacy.

altairprime 1 hour ago | |

Weirdly, the shell commands seemed perfectly fine as helper tool scripts (my ~/bin is littered with these to this day) but the syntax highlighting is what exceeded my disbelief.

alexpotato 1 hour ago |

whenever I join a new firm (usually as a DevOps or SRE) I ask the Linux team which server in the firm has the longest uptime.

Invariably, I then send them this post where it shows the uptime from the host in the movie (I'll let the reader click through to see the time): https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/9041/whose-hardwar...

If you're curious, the longest uptime I've had someone report back was in excess of 4 years.

P.S. I also remember working at a big investment bank and the oldest Good Till Cancel order in the mainframe was a Buy CSCO @ $6 from the late 1990s (this was in 2010).

yawpitch 1 hour ago |

I worked on this movie, mainly from a CentOS shell, and I approve this nitpick.

mewse-hn 2 hours ago |

Why is this guy so obsessed with the variable vs fixed-width font, you'd think he's the guy who wrote putty or something

Timwi 1 hour ago | |

I'm confused. The whole point of the post, as stated in the title, is to nitpick that one movie scene. Why does the inclusion of one specific nitpick bother you when it's completely on-topic?

meatmanek 53 minutes ago | | |

it's a joke: the author of the post is literally the guy who wrote PuTTY

xenophonf 31 minutes ago |

Simon writes:

> To [switch users], /bin/login would need to be setuid, and it certainly isn’t on Linux... _Perhaps_ Solaris (or SolarOS) is different?

The login command is indeed setuid root on SunOS 4, to which the movie pays homage, as its documented behavior is "to [permanently] change from one userID to another". The su command explicitly means "temporarily switch to a new user ID".

Here are copies of the SunOS 4 manual pages, if you're curious:

http://www.typewritten.org/Manual/Sun/SunOS/4.0.2/man1/login...

http://www.typewritten.org/Manual/Sun/SunOS/4.0.2/man1/su.ht...

And here's a link to the relevant bits of the SunOS 4.1.3 source code:

https://github.com/Arquivotheca/SunOS-4.1.3/blob/2e8a93c3946...

ck2 1 hour ago |

this makes me remember Trinity doing the power plant escalation hack in the 2nd Matrix movie

the code apparently was legit, I think it was an SSH exploit

(btw that movie is TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD)

Bender 1 hour ago | |

I was in the theater when that first played. Half of the theater were cheering, some standing up. Many movie-goers were very confused. Yes she used nmap [1] and then sshnuke [2] and given she was hacking a power company it would not surprise me if that exploit worked in some utility companies today.

[1] - https://nmap.org/movies/

[2] - https://blog.doyensec.com/2025/03/04/exploitable-sshd.html

ianmcgowan 2 hours ago |

Now I'm watching this thread for the consultant hired by the film to show up and explain why each of those goofs was caused by the director explicitly asking for them...

gmueckl 1 hour ago | |

I'm purely guessing, but I can imagine quite vividly how some of these things might have happened. Probably, a consultant was asked to generate a plausible version of some of these elements and they were quite careful in doing so. They delivered material (text transcripts etc.) to a graphics designer who was tasked to turn this into a cool-looking animated sequence. Software like AfterEffects doesn't naturally emulate terminal behavior and that's how the perfect word wrapping and proportional fonts were introduced. That whole animation was then essentially cut into the movie in post. There's no direct interaction between Sam and the console shown, only his reactions.

It's interesting that the terminal window running top does have a proper non-proportional font. This is likely an actual screen recording of a Linux system terminal pasted into the animation.

That whole sequence is less than 30 seconds packed with information presented on a screen together with unimportant elements that are borderline confusing to non-technical audiences. I would have forgiven the art direction if they had reduced the visual complexity of this screen layout into something more cartoonish to make the story clearer.

stephenlf 2 hours ago |

Very fun analysis!