1. sl

Thanks to Asdasd, I discovered “sl”. An incredibly useless but very necessary program that just shows a train in ASCII art going through your terminal. Maybe one of the most appealing commands of this top ten.

2. pi

Credit goes to cameronhorsburgh for bringing this one up. “pi” displays an approximation of PI, useful if you are making some calculation, I guess. The syntax is:

pi [number of digits to display]

3. dog

Coats was the one to bring this one up. “dog” is an alternative to “cat” (see the humor?), as it uses the same syntax to display a text stream into the console. You will probably have to install it as it is not a command offered by default, but when you do, I invite you to take a look at the manual page.

4. vdir

“vdir” is useless in that it is a redundancy. Its main function is to list the content of a directory, displaying the name of the files, the permissions, the dates of modification, the sizes, etc. However, all of this can be done via the good old command “ls” and its composite like

ls -l

5. clear

“clear” is also a redundancy. With this command, you will erase the lines from the terminal and “clear the screen.” But anyone adept with the console will save time by using the shortcut “Ctrl+l”, which does exactly the same thing.

6. ul

An interesting command, “ul” can be used to underline characters in the terminal. I still have not figured it out completely but I know that, for example, it will transform

echo $'hello w\b_o\b_r\b_l\b_d\b_ ' | ul

into “hello world“. As you can guess, it replaces the meta-character “\b_” with an actual underlining.

7. w

You can say whatever you want about “w”, but it is to my knowledge the shortest command you can find by default on your machine. And I think that it therefore deserves to be in our list just for that. Surprisingly, “w” allows you to see information about the current users, like their name, their login time, etc.

8. filters

A moore’s contribution: filters is a set of tools that transforms text to give it some phonetic accent. “man talkfilters” will give you the list of the possible accents. But as an example,

echo "make tech easier is cool" | fudd

will give “make tech easiew is coow ” which supposedly imitates Elmer Fudd’s accent (the guy who hunts Bugs Bunny in Looney Tunes). And one of my favorites, the filter “warez” will give you your input in H4x0r code. The previous example becomes “]\/[ak3 73k]-[ 3az13r YZ c0ol" with "warez" instead of "fudd" at the end of the command.

9. fortune mods

Last time, I presented to you the famous fortune command which gives you a (relatively) short and random geek sentence each time you call it. However, if you can add your own fortunes to the database, it is also possible to download extensions, or mods, which add fortunes from a specific source, like Star Wars, the Chuck Norris facts, different languages, Matrix, Futurama, Calvin and Hobbes, and more. Install the mod that you want and do

fortune [name of the mod]

As an example, I installed the Chuck Norris fact extension in English, so by doing

fortune chucknorris

I get "Chuck Norris grinds his coffee with his teeth and boils the water with his own rage."

10. snow

Finally, a little script to end the top ten. I could not stop myself from sharing the snow.sh script from myh3r3.com which creates little snowflakes falling into your terminal. Copy-paste the code into a text file, name it "snow.sh", make it executable, and launch it in a terminal to admire.

#!/bin/bash
 
LINES=$(tput lines)
COLUMNS=$(tput cols)
 
declare -A snowflakes
declare -A lastflakes
 
clear
 
function move_flake() {
i="$1"
 
if [ "${snowflakes[$i]}" = "" ] || [ "${snowflakes[$i]}" = "$LINES" ]; then
snowflakes[$i]=0
else
if [ "${lastflakes[$i]}" != "" ]; then
printf "\033[%s;%sH \033[1;1H " ${lastflakes[$i]} $i
fi
fi
 
printf "\033[%s;%sH*\033[1;1H" ${snowflakes[$i]} $i
 
lastflakes[$i]=${snowflakes[$i]}
snowflakes[$i]=$((${snowflakes[$i]}+1))
}
 
while :
do
i=$(($RANDOM % $COLUMNS))
 
move_flake $i
 
for x in "${!lastflakes[@]}"
do
move_flake "$x"
done
 
sleep 0.1
done

Conclusion

First, I want to thank you all for your comments on the previous article. I tried to put here a synthesized version of what you reported in order to share it with more people. Of course, this list is still not complete, and even if I personally doubt that it will ever be, I still invite you to continue to share.

So again, if you can think of more, or if you have an example in mind of when these commands become handy, please leave us a comment.

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1. cal

Few people know this, but any Unix system comes with a built-in calendar. To access it, you can simply type:

cal

This will display the current month. However, you can select the precise year that you want as an argument, and even the month. And to be fully useless, the option “-j” displays Julian days (the number of days from January 1). To sum up:

cal [-j] [[month] year]

2. time cat

You can use this command as a built-in timer. It will run in the background until you stop it, and will then report the time elapsed between the start and the end of its process. As useful as it may seems, it is actually quite unpractical because you cannot check its value unless you stop it. I suppose it can become handy in a very specific situation but I have trouble imagining which one exactly. To launch just type:

time cat

and to kill, use the combination “Ctrl+c”

3. yes

A very peculiar command with only one ability: repeating a string until its process is killed. Again, I don’t picture where it can be useful, but who knows? The syntax is straightforward:

yes [string]

4. rev

This command is for reversing any input (as its name suggests). When I say reverse, it means that if the input is “Linux”, the output will be “xuniL”. Pretty strange, I know.

rev

You will enter an interactive mode. You can quit it by using the shortcut “Ctrl+c”. But rev can also work to reverse an entire file with

rev [path of the file]

5. factor

It’s time to do some Maths. Let’s begin easy with the command factor which can decompose a given number into prime factors:

factor [number to decompose]

I haven’t tested the limits of this command yet, but it seems pretty powerful. As a side note, prime numbers and the decomposition into prime factors is actually the basis for modern cryptography and Internet security. Knowing a little bit about them is always interesting. If you want to learn more, take a look at the RSA encryption.

6. Multiplication Tables

This is actually more a script than a command but it is impossible to ignore it when talking about funny stuff you can do in a console. By using

for i in {1..9}; do for j in $(seq 1 $i); do echo -ne $i×$j=$((i*j))\\t;done; echo;done

The terminal will display the multiplication table, nicely ordered in columns. Incredibly useless, and pretty long to remember, but you have to admit that it looks good.

7. PI

A bit more complex, you can calculate an approximation of pi through commands using

seq -f '4/%g' 1 2 99999 | paste -sd-+ | bc -l

This combination of commands is a little bit harder to understand, but if you really want to know, seq generates the sequence of 4/1, 4/3, 4/4 until 4/99999 (without 4/2), paste merges these lines using a delimiter, and bc does the final approximation using a math library.

8. figlet

Figlet is a command for those who love to write in ASCII art. It greatly simplifies this task as it automatically transforms any given string. It comes with a bunch of fonts, by default at /usr/share/figlet/fonts/, and you can of course add yours.

figlet [-f path to the font] [string]

Note: You will need to install “figlet” before you can use this command.

9. cowsay

cosway is very famous in the Linux world, but this command is not always present by default in every distribution. In Ubuntu, install it with the command:

sudo apt-get install cowsay

It displays a cow in ASCII art saying whatever string you want. It comes with a couple of other characters and you can add your own. The default directory for them is /usr/share/cows/. The syntax is:

cowsay [-f path of another character] [string for the cow]

10. fortune

fortune displays a random sentence, in the same spirit as fortune cookies. It is not always installed by default so you may want to add it. In Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install fortune

It comes with a very handy option: “-s” for short, which will limit to fortunes composed of one sentence or less.

fortune [-s]

Combinations

The fun part is now to combine the previous commands for a funnier result. A famous combination is fortune and cowsay, which creates a cow in ASCII art telling you a random fortune:

fortune -s | cowsay

My personal favorite is a random character from cowsay telling you a random short fortune:

cowsay -f "$(ls /usr/share/cows/ | sort -R | head -1)" "$(fortune -s)"

To explain briefly, it is the same as earlier: a random fortune is pushed into cowsay, but I added the option “-f” for selecting a character. The path given is a combination of listing the files from within the default directory for the characters, random sorting of this list, and keeping only the first line.

But I suppose that you could also do something like

yes "$(figlet Linux)"

in order to repeat a piece of ASCII art, or even

cowsay "$(seq -f '4/%g' 1 2 99999 | paste -sd-+ | bc -l)"

to have a cow telling you the approximation of pi.

As always when exploring the console, there are a lot of things that can be done (even if doing them seems very useless).

Conclusion

I tried my best to collect what I found was the funniest among the Linux commands. Retrospectively, it was pretty hard to come up with a list, since, ironically, most of the Internet is helpful for finding useful commands, not the opposite.

Can you think of more funny and/or useless commands? More combinations? Or on the contrary, a utility of those listed above? Please let us know in the comments.

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Windows: We suck more! and that’s guaranteed

Never ending crash…

Windows…Beware your back

When there’s nothing else to burn…

Even FreeBSD join in the campfire…

Even Mac are not spared…

The Ultimatium

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Customer: “How much do Windows cost?”
Tech support: “Windows costs about $100.”
Customer: “Oh, that’s kind of expensive. Can I buy just one window?”
———————————————————————————————————————–

Tech support: “Ok, we’re going to check your modem settings. First thing we need to do is make sure all programs are closed.”
Customer: “How do I know if everything is closed?”
Tech support: “Make sure all windows are closed.”
Customer: “But…I’m in the basement. I don’t have any windows here.”
————————————————————————————————————————

Tech support: “Do you have any windows open right now?”
Customer: “Are you crazy, it’s twenty below outside…”
————————————————————————————————————————

Customer: “My computer won’t work. You guys must have broken it when you installed the modem.”
Tech support: “What happens when you turn it on?”
Customer: “It won’t turn on anymore!!!!!”
Tech support: “So you don’t see any lights or hear any noise?”
Customer: “I’m telling you it WON’T TURN ON.”
Tech support: “Is it plugged in?
Customer: “OF COURSE it’s plugged in, you MORON!”
Tech support: “When you push the power button it–”
Customer: “Power button? This computer doesn’t have a power button.”
Tech support: “Sir, all computers have power buttons. Look at the front of the case, find the word ‘power,’ and push the button.”
Customer: “YOU FIXED IT!! Thanks!!!!”
————————————————————————————————————————–

Compaq is considering changing the command “Press Any Key” to “Press Return Key” because of the flood of calls asking where the “Any” key is.
————————————————————————————————————————

Customer: “My printer is not working and I suspect my computer got a visual problem.”
Tech support: “What happened?”
Customer: “When I try to print my document, the computer says it couldn’t find the printer, so I turn the computer screen to face the printer, and the computer still cannot see it.
————————————————————————————————————————

Customer: “Hello, is this Tech Support?”
Tech support: “Yes, it is. How may I help you?”
Customer: “The cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my Warranty period. How do I go about getting that fixed?”
Tech support: “I’m sorry, but did you say a cup holder?”
Customer: “Yes, it’s attached to the front of my computer.”
Tech support: “Please excuse me if I seem a bit stumped, It’s because I am. Did you receive this as part of a promotion, at a trade show? How did you get this cup holder? Does it have any trademark on it?”
Customer: “It came with my computer, I don’t know anything about a promotion. It just has ’16X’ on it.”
(The caller had been using the load drawer of the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder.)
——————————————————————————————————————–

Tech support: “Ok, ma’am, I need you to do a ctrl-alt-del.”
Customer: “How do I do that?”
Tech support: “Push and hold ‘ctrl’ and ‘alt’ at the same time, and then hit ‘delete’.”
Customer: “Where are those?”
Tech support: (explains the location of the keys)
Customer: “Nothing happened.”
Tech support: “Try again.”
Customer: “Still nothing.”
A minute or two later….
Customer: “Should I turn my computer on? Would that help?”
———————————————————————————————————————-

Customer: I’m trying to connect to the Internet with your CD, but it just doesn’t work. What am I doing wrong?
Tech support: OK, you’ve got the CD in the CD drive, right?
Customer: Yeah….
Tech support: And what sort of computer are you using?
Customer: Computer? Oh no, I haven’t got a computer. It’s in the CD player and all I get is weird noises. Listen…..
Tech support: Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!!!
———————————————————————————————————————————-

Tech Support: Click on the ‘my computer’ icon on to the left of the screen.
Customer: Your left or my left?
———————————————————————————————————————————–

Tech support: How may I help you?
Customer: I’m writing my first e-mail.
Tech support: OK, and what seems to be the problem?
Customer: Well, I have the letter ‘a’ in the address, but how do I get the circle around it?
————————————————————————————————————————-

A woman customer called the Canon help desk with a problem with her printer.
Tech support: Are you running it under windows?
Customer: “No, my desk is next to the door, but that is a good point. The man sitting in the cubicle next to me is under a window, and his printer is working fine.”

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