Dr. Johns talks about 3 quirky and forgotten Linux commands: fortune, cowsay, and lolcat. From generating random quotes with fortune, adding a playful ASCII cow with cowsay, to coloring text in vibrant rainbows with lolcat, these commands bring humor and personality to the terminal.
Learn how to install and combine these commands for entertaining terminal output and discover a whimsical side of early Unix and Linux systems that often goes unnoticed in modern GUI-based environments.
00:00 Introduction
00:20 Exploring the Fortune Command
01:28 Fun with Cowsay
02:50 Adding Color with Lolcat
03:26 Combining Commands for Fun
03:55 Installing and Using the Commands
04:23 Conclusion
#linux #commandprompts #linuxterminal
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These commands remind me how infantile and humour-free Unixoids are.
just you talking won't do it, why didn't you show the terminal?
Linux version: 5.10.0-30-amd64, Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye) None of these commands are to be found. One wonders what version of Linux the OP was using.
I've used the fortune for years to form part of my MoTD banners for log-in sessions alongside the rest of the boiler plate text, it helped to teach people to look at MoTD for messages instead of ignoring it.
If I'm not mistaken the "cowsays" is based on the ASCII graphics drawing of a cow that soon appeared after the introduction of the "sideways" emoticon using text characters ":-)" — with an alternate using semicolon to have a winking smiley-face.
It was also somewhat commonplace for folks to use ASCII graphics (darn it, haven't figured out to select monospace in yuotube comment).
ah yes, some classic "game" programs (or what might be called "desktop toy" nowadays) often found in Unix (usually located in a place like /etc/games). Other classics include the banner and block-letter programs, as well as the paper tape and punch card program (that give text graphics representation of paper tape or punch card).
More elaborate programs like "rain" utilize the terminfo/termcap to generate animated display.
A common prank to pull on folks was to redirect the output of rain to someone's terminal ( e.g. the /dev/tty### device — which you can discover by using the "who" or "finger" program) if they've not disabled "talk".
Well hecky-darn; I was hoping to see some examples. Favorite CPU opcode: unmask non-maskable interrupt. It lets you do some initialization, like setting up the stack pointer, before ANY interrupts are triggered. And once git told me, "You are working in a detached head state." I know my head is sometimes detached (or, at least it seems that way), but how does the computer know where my head is at?
My first Linux did the pipe to make the cowsay go. It didn't have the 3rd one. This happened any time you booted the machine.
ls -l | grep -i stupid | tee cat > /dev/null
No example?
And you might want to look at some of the older 'error' messages, too. I remember running a print job, and it reporting my printer was on fire due to a paper jam…
Bash in syslinux doesn't recognize these commands.
fortune, forgotten?
lolcat , needs 30 MB, not installing it
Back in the 90s when I first installed an early version of slackware linux on a friend's 486, slack was set up to run fortune in the shell straight after login. So fortune was probably technically the first program I ever ran on GNU/linux, greeting me (unexpectedly and somewhat bafflingly at the time) with a random fortune the very first time I logged in to that box. I don't remember which fortune was the first I got, unfortunately. I do remember that there seemed to be a fairly limited list so you'd start to see them repeat if you used the system a lot.
'sl' is nice too. it has even options like 'sl -l' π