Fun With Linux (CLI and other)

Linux Discussion Applications
23

I totally forgot about one that you guys may not have heard of:
Bro Pages. :joy:
Instead of [man] you type [bro]. It’s crowdsourced with voting and such to get the best definitions to the top, but all entries have several definitions.
I don’t know how robust it is as I haven’t tried it in years, but something in this thread reminded me of it.
http://bropages.org/

Also this:

What a great find! I plan to go back and watch all of this. Looks awesome.

24

Awesome thread.
I put this at the end of my .bashrc for random Chuck Norris jokes:

curl -s https://api.chucknorris.io/jokes/random | python2 -c 'import sys, json; print "\n\n"+json.load(sys.stdin)["value"]+"\n\n"' | sed 's/"/"/g'
4 Likes
25

Love this! Very *nix-y, too, piping curl through the python json module and sed. Nice.

26

I don’t even know where to start. How about things just for fun and looks?

cmatrix is a classic and a must have for every hacker to fill unused terminal.

If you like cowsay, how about ponysay. I like using it together with fortune.

And for my special trick: playing sound (using mpv) each time command returns an error.
put it into ~/.bashrc

bash_prompt_command(){
    local ret=$?
    if [ $ret != 0 ] && [ $ret != 130 ]
    then
        signalerror
    fi
}

signalerror(){
    (mpv /home/kikuchiyo/kamimashita.wav --volume=120 --loop-file=no --no-terminal &) 2> /dev/null
}

export PROMPT_COMMAND=bash_prompt_command
2 Likes
27

Is it functionally different from creating alias alias bro="man"?

28

Oh, and I can’t believe I didn’t mention application I’ve written.

It let’s you quickly cd into saved directory, without typing whole patch each time:

29

Another great CLI applications I use are:

  1. Task Warrior – simple TODO list which can be made complex if needed. Also my favorite TODO application ever.
  2. ncdu – du is basic unix command for calculating space taken by directories and files. It’s great, but could use some readability. Ncdu is ncurses interface for du, meaning it’s calculates which files/directories under current path are biggest, shows it in nice graphical interface, lets you navigate into directories and gives some other options.
2 Likes
30

I totally love ncdu. I use it on my OpenMediaVault NAS a lot. This is because calculating a folder size (with many tiny files and subfolders inside) will take forever over SMB otherwise (if I right-click a folder in my file browser and choose “Properties” for an SMB-shared folder). SMB sucks that way, and it doesn’t matter if you have GbE or not.

31

Yeah. The descriptions are written by community members (anyone can write one, if I’m not mistaken), and the best are upvoted. Check out the link. It’s a fun project.

1 Like
33

You might also add ponypipe to the mix, but unless you’re on arch you need to compile it manually. It might be better to rewrite it in python and put on pip or something.