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The Jurassic Park franchise has always been pretty good at being scientifically accurate even with computers, as can be seen here. Jurassic World 2 seems to be no exception. At some point the system analyst diagnoses a failing ventilation system, and the command used looks like a valid unix console starting with sudo and using the standard -- for option in command line.

What I managed to read was:

sudo dudecode --isolate

Is it really dudecode and an easter egg for those who read it? Or is this a real command like dmidecode which is a DMI table decoder? --isolate does not seem to be an option for dmidecode.

Knowing the kind of attention to detail in previous films, I find it interesting to see if its something that could really be used to solve a hardware problem using a software access? What would the real command used be, and would a real system analyst use it in this situation?

I realize it will be hard to have definite proof of what the command was (as the film is still in theater as I'm writting this) but a screenshot or someone with certainty would be nice.

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  • 8
    +1 for taking criticism to heart and turning the question around with a great deal of effort and motivation. Nice work!
    – Napoleon Wilson ♦
    Jul 2 '18 at 16:29
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    There is a uudecode command for Unix, but that doesn't mean that dudecode is invalid - it's just the name of a system command or program call from the command line - even if it's not part of Unix itself, the park will have custom code created for their operations, so it's entirely plausible that command/program does something to reset/reinitialise the vents. If they stay broken after the reset, I'd presume they would send out a hardware tech to check for physical problems.
    – Dave
    Jul 2 '18 at 17:35
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    anyone else that reads "dude code" here and thinks it might be a pun?
    – Tode
    Jul 3 '18 at 9:08
  • Only 46 hits in google, so probably made up for the movie.
    – user15319
    Jul 6 '18 at 16:00
  • That edit is probably better fit as an answer or an ammendment to an answer.
    – Napoleon Wilson ♦
    Aug 1 '19 at 11:29
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It's likely that it might have been custom code that the park's IT had created, or an alias to the "sudo systemctl restart 'serviceName'" to restart the service/application that runs the ventilation.

There is no standard command in UNIX/Linux called Dudecode. There is a uudecode command in Linux/UNIX. It's function is to decode a file from 7-bit ASCII to binary form. Uuencode encodes it to 7-bit ASCII from binary.

According to the man page for these commands, there is no --ISOLATE option. Thus one can conclude that the --ISOLATE switch is fictional.

https://linux.die.net/man/1/uudecode

https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/1-uudecode/

https://www.unix.com/man-page/posix/1P/uudecode/

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  • There is no reason for the system analyst to know about a custom command used in an organisation he never worked for. Also dmidecode retrieve hardware detail and would be closer to what someone need to debug hardware than uudecode. Let's hope a screenshot stop those specualations :)
    – Jylo
    Jul 5 '18 at 16:10
  • It's also Hollywood, though, so one could also conclude that they simply could've had the props dept (or whoever makes fake computer stroke programs) make a script that runs, and simulates command entry. Thus "dudecode --isolate" is something they just made up entirely to look good. No one actually bothered to research anything to that detail. My reply is simply the most-similar command to what the OP is referencing. "dudecode --isolate" is what he managed to see when he watched, so that's what I found to help answer his question.
    – MissouriSpartan
    Jul 5 '18 at 16:37
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If you're referring to the scene where the character tries to enable the HVAC system at the 200 minute mark, I believe the command was:

sudo dmidecode -t system

Which is a real command that prints system-type DMI/SMBIOS data (you can learn more about the command in the man page), for example the serial number of the motherboard and such. I'm not sure how that information was useful in that situation, but yep, it is a real command, and yes, it's a unix system!.

The other commands typed were also real-ish, for example he first tries to log into a serwer via the ssh command twice, first time getting an error (a weird one, might be fake), the second getting a standard warning about server key authenticity. Then also he ran ls- all, which is almost real (the real command would be ls --all, which would print all files in current working directory).

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  • I found a screenshot, sadly the command in the film was invalid (see edited question) :(
    – Jylo
    Aug 1 '19 at 11:27
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According to this Reddit thread its :

sudo dmidecode -isolate

Actual screenshot of the moment it happens.

But after looking at dmidecode man page, only the -s and -t option exists. So it would probably error out for i, o, l, a and e.

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