Fun at the Unix Terminal

[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?

[gricardo99]

where can you actually find the code? For whatever reason, I can't get it from my centos distro (yum search rig, doesn't show anything related). And googling "linux rig command", I don't see any links to the actual source.

[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).

[daleroberts]

Me having fun with true color and Unicode 9.0 characters:

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!

[bclemens]

ERROR: lp0 on fire

[vram22]

I've seen a 'banner' command in some Unix versions. Often used to print the motd (message of the day) that you got when you logged in, and also by sysadmins to write a banner message to everyone's terminal like "System going down in 10 minutes" etc.

[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

[betenoire]

Where does the pink term border come from?

[niceperson]

I had no clue about that!

[Cbeck527]

Shameless plug for a CLI *say derivitive that a coworker and I made: RabbitSay. 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

[mushiake]

sl [0] is always my favorite.

[0]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!

[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

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

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

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

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

[vram22]

Well, this is not specifically for utilities in the sense of scripts in a file, or compiled binaries, but commandlinefu.com has many Unix one-or-more-liners.

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse

[stevekemp]

I wonder if it is time for a freshmeat.net alternative?

[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/)

[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...

[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

[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...

[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!

[mrkgnao]

asciiquarium and pipes, too.

[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 :)