
Fun at the Unix Terminal - melqdusy
http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1483
======
Jerry2
> _Well, the rig utility can help, it creates a random identity. For some
> reason rig will never generate an identity that lives in Utah._

Heh, I was curious why that is. Was the author from UT? Afraid of breaking
some laws? After looking at the source, the author has a list of 60 or so
cities and they're spread across 25 states: SC, AZ, TX, OH, KS, IA, WI, MI,
NJ, NY, PA, IN, VA, NC, RI, TN, WA, MS, CA, IL, CO, FL, GA, MN, NE. So UT was
not the only one omitted.

Oh well, at least my curiosity was satisfied.

~~~
folli
Is there something similar which also creates email adresses and stores the
generated profiles in a database in order to retrieve them again later? May be
even have the ability to store associated passwords?

~~~
Karunamon
Fakenamegenerator[1] will generate disposable email addresses based on the
identity it cooked up. No https without paying, though...

[1]: [http://www.fakenamegenerator.com](http://www.fakenamegenerator.com)

------
lloeki
Instead of:

    
    
        $ fortune > my_fortune.txt
        $ say -f my_fortune.txt
    

One could use the underrated (bashism) process substitution:

    
    
        $ say -f <(fortune)
    

Which works wonders for e.g diff'ing live:

    
    
        $ diff <(ssh elvis ls -1 foo) <(ls -1 bar)

~~~
masklinn
Why would you even bother with that when `say` can take a string or read from
stdin?

Just use

    
    
        $ say $(fortune)
    

or

    
    
        $ fortune | say -f-
    
    

For bonus coolness, add "-i" (it prints the lines and highlights the current
word during reading).

~~~
mfukar
Because it's fun spawning a new process and watching the otherwise idle cores
of your box reach 0.1% usage for a millisecond.

~~~
nerdponx
Don't all three of those commands spawn new processes?

~~~
mfukar
Not _shell_ processes, no.

------
daleroberts
Me having fun with true color and Unicode 9.0 characters:

[https://github.com/daleroberts/tv](https://github.com/daleroberts/tv)

------
LeoPanthera
For those of a certain age, piping figlet into your local line printer was a
fun, if noisy, way to make giant banners.

~~~
girishso
It was "banner" for me!

------
petepete
For fancy text Toilet is great too. It's like Figlet but supports colours,
filters, and comes with more fonts.

[https://i.stack.imgur.com/LbsmC.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LbsmC.png)

~~~
betenoire
Where does the pink term border come from?

~~~
petepete
A tmux or screen theme possibly?

------
Cbeck527
Shameless plug for a CLI *say derivitive that a coworker and I made:
RabbitSay. [http://www.rabbitsay.wtf](http://www.rabbitsay.wtf)

    
    
      $ pip install rabbitsay
      $ rabbitsay "shameless plug"
      ┌───────────┐
      | shameless |
      |   plug    |
      └───────────┘
      (\__/) ||
      (•ㅅ•) ||
      / 　 づ

~~~
jck
It is actually really easy to create custom cow templates for cowsay:
[https://github.com/schacon/cowsay/blob/master/cows/bunny.cow](https://github.com/schacon/cowsay/blob/master/cows/bunny.cow)

------
mushiake
sl [0] is always my favorite.

[0][https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl](https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl)

~~~
sanpan
Is there a way to lolcat sl?

------
_binder
> This is aimed at grade 6 students

I read through the whole thing with joy, and I am 20

~~~
ziroshima
Same, but I'm 36!

~~~
hownottowrite
I can confirm that enjoyment can be found up to age 46.

------
kasperset
Unix terminal can be endless fun with piping and process substitution. One of
the reasons people like GUI is because recognition memory is usually better
than recall memory.

------
beothorn
I don't remember where did I get this from but it is a cool thing to add to
your .bashrc

    
    
      #!/bin/bash
      #teach you some new commands every time you open a new terminal
      echo 'Did you know that:'
      echo $( whatis $(ls /bin | shuf | head -1))
      echo $( whatis $(ls /sbin | shuf | head -1))
      echo $( whatis $(ls /usr/bin | shuf | head -1))
    

edit: formatting

------
dandermotj
Does anyone have a place/site for browsing through new/popular utilities? I've
been on Ubuntu for the last year and I love it, but reading this I just
realised I don't have anywhere to browse or find things like this.

~~~
ldjb
You can view a list of new Ubuntu packages from its website [0]. You might
also want to check out the packages in the games [1], misc [2] and text [3]
sections, which are full of fun utilities. You might also want to view the man
pages from the games section [4].

[0]
[http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/newpkg?mode=byage](http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/newpkg?mode=byage)

[1]
[http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/games/](http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/games/)

[2]
[http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/misc/](http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/misc/)

[3]
[http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/text/](http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/text/)

[4] [https://linux.die.net/man/6/](https://linux.die.net/man/6/)

------
mark212
You kids today and your fancy command lines. When I was in sixth grade, state
of the art joking around with technology meant multiplying two numbers on a
calculator with red LEDs and turning it upside down to (sort of) spell SHELL
OIL

------
Manishearth
On Ubuntu, say isn't available by default, but I think `espeak` is, and it
works mostly the same. At least, it's always been there on my Ubuntu systems,
but I may have installed it manually and then forgot about it :)

------
philh
For rot13, I've found it particularly helpful to have an alias set up to
translate the contents of the clipboard. I basically always have a terminal on
screen, so to read rot13 text I just have to copy and run a single command. On
OS X:

    
    
        alias rot13='tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M'
        alias pbr13='pbpaste | rot13; echo'
    

(echo adds a newline to play well with bash; on linux I use xsel instead of
pbpaste.)

------
d33
Surprised nobody commented on bb yet. This thing is really impressive - and I
thought that mplayer -vo caca is jaw-dropping!

~~~
ja_k
and then realising the last time the BB project page was updated was 1997.. 20
years ago!

([http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/bb/](http://aa-
project.sourceforge.net/bb/))

~~~
bigbugbag
bb is not a project, it is a demo[1] from the demoscene. It ranked 10th at
abduction 1997[2].

The demoscene is an unending source of awesome and amazing. The 4k and 64k
categories will blow your mind, if you ever wondered "can a FPS game could be
done in under 100kB?", the answer has been released in 2004 and its name is
.kkrieger[3]

[1]:
[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=17468](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=17468)

[2]:
[http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=75&when=1997](http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=75&when=1997)

[3]:
[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12036](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12036)

------
dotancohen
This is great, I've recently asked a related question about CLI commands that
would be fit for kids: [http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/185988/linux-
command...](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/185988/linux-commands-for-
kids)

------
maephisto
A couple of days ago I created “jazzup” a fun cli utility that adds a
soundtrack and movie quotes to your long running boring commands. Check it out
on npm :
[https://www.npmjs.com/package/jazzup](https://www.npmjs.com/package/jazzup)

~~~
vram22
Speaking of sound and CLI, I created this musical command-line alarm clock
recently (in Python):

[https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/12/jal-tarang-and-musical-
al...](https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/12/jal-tarang-and-musical-alarm-clock-
in.html)

------
sengork
aafire(1) is fun too, especially in colour with fixed term font.

Likewise aaxine(1) which renders videos in ASCII art.

~~~
sguav
With friends using VLC on their linux box and unaware of the beauty of
libaa/libcaca, I'd type:

    
    
        vlc --vout caca videofilename.ext
    

and then look at them being scared/curious/amazed in that order!

~~~
fjarlq
Hey, cool. Here's how to do that with `mpv` on macOS:

    
    
        $ brew install mpv --with-libcaca
        $ mpv --vo=caca --really-quiet videofilename.ext

------
Philomath
That's nice! I'll try to show them to my young brother (13). He's never used
the Terminal before and he might find some fun in this. Thank you!

------
hestefisk
Surprised there is no fun with urandom. I clearly remember my first fun with
cat'ing /dev/urandom > /dev/pcm0 back in 1999 :)

------
bigkm
It's a shame the author polarizes having fun and learning. I've always thought
of them as the same.

~~~
omaranto
The same? That's pretty odd. You've never had fun without learning something
at the same time, nor learned something without having fun.

For me only one of those things is true: I think I always have fun learning,
but I certainly have had fun without learning anything, too.

------
agumonkey
Had no clue bc accepted new definitions.. RTFM strikes back.

------
leephillips
He left out nyancat.

