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Show HN: ASCII Animals in Your Terminal

62 points| ivolo | 13 years ago |ivolo.me | reply

31 comments

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[+] raldi|13 years ago|reply 

    curl -s [url] | sh
Please don't train people to do that.
[+] DanHulton|13 years ago|reply
Yeah, I NEARLY ran that second command, then I saw what it did and my heart did a backflip. "Seriously, I'm being asked to do that on HN?"

Then I came here to see if anyone else had.

[+] fletchowns|13 years ago|reply
npm used to suggest something similar as an easy way to install...

  curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh
[+] dredmorbius|13 years ago|reply
Among my biggest gripes about RVM (the Ruby enVironment Manager): that's the install method.

https://rvm.io/rvm/install/

But SRSLY?!!!!!!!

How does RVM work? By throwing a shit-ton of hooks into your shell environment.

That shit right there made me put the brakes on and try to grok the hell out of what the tool did right there.

Upshot: it's useful and seems to do what it promises. Still bugs the crap out of me though.

The animated ASCII stuff? "nobody" account on a VM.

[+] shawnz|13 years ago|reply
Honestly... that is an extraordinarily strange (and dangerous) model for executing things in a terminal. It's not a web browser!

I mean, cool idea, I guess... but I don't think I'd ever execute it as documented on a machine I own. Sorry!

[+] unknown|13 years ago|reply

[deleted]

[+] fletchowns|13 years ago|reply
Reminds me of

  telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
(can't believe this is still up after all these years)
[+] makmanalp|13 years ago|reply
My god, I remember being spellbound by this for hours as a novice, after learning my first few shell commands and managing to get the damn modem to work on linux.
[+] sciurus|13 years ago|reply
Speaking of ASCII art in your terminal,

  $ apt-get install sl
  $ /usr/games/sl
[+] pooriaazimi|13 years ago|reply
`sl` also takes arguments, which change the shape and size of that damn locomotive: -a -l -F

It's a fun, masochistic joke, but I seriously encourage everyone to install it (it's available on Homebrew, if you're an OS X user). Every time you do an `sl` you must immediately resolve to be more careful when doing things on terminal. It `ls` is harmless, but what if it was `rm`?

[+] bayesbiol|13 years ago|reply
Yay for steam locomotive! I think of it as a handy reminder from your sys-admin "don't drink and ssh!"
[+] jewel|13 years ago|reply
There are practical uses for ASCII animals. When I built a command-line tool to let the developers sign out for a 15 minute break at my last job (because doing it via the AS/400 interface was a big hassle), I used a big, yellow elephant [1]. This made it easy to remember to hit the enter key to go back on the clock when they got back to their computer.

[1]: I think it was this one: http://thesteve.org/up/elephant.txt

[+] dhimes|13 years ago|reply
You had developers do WHATTTTT????
[+] anveo|13 years ago|reply
/usr/games/cowsay -f `ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows | shuf -n1` `/usr/games/fortune`
[+] mixmastamyk|13 years ago|reply
Neat, but it seems to make an http request for every frame. Unclear if requests caches that, but I did get a socket error on KeyboardInterrupt so I don't think so.