Fun/Interesting Shell Programs

[20 Smartness]

I've been googling this for days to find something fun to do with my Ubuntu 8.04 Server that is currently doing nothing.

So far I've found these two fun shell apps:

[b][url=http://www.figlet.org/]FIGlet[/url] - "A program for making large letters out of ordinary text"[/b]
Can be installed using: "apt-get install figlet"

FIGlet takes a string as input and outputs it as ASCII text, using lots of different fonts and styles.
There is also a large collection of fonts that you can download and install from [url=http://www.jave.de/figlet/fonts.html]here[/url], which you need to extract into "/usr/share/figlet", and can be used with the "-f" argument, followed by a font name.

Example:

 _____                                     _
|  ___|_ _  ___ ___ _ __  _   _ _ __   ___| |__    ___ ___  _ __ ___
| |_ / _` |/ __/ _ \ '_ \| | | | '_ \ / __| '_ \  / __/ _ \| '_ ` _ \
|  _| (_| | (_|  __/ |_) | |_| | | | | (__| | | || (_| (_) | | | | | |
|_|  \__,_|\___\___| .__/ \__,_|_| |_|\___|_| |_(_)___\___/|_| |_| |_|
                   |_|

[b][url=http://www.nog.net/~tony/warez/cowsay.shtml]Cowsay[/url] - "Basically a text filter. Send some text into it, and you get a cow saying your text."[/b]
Can be installed using: "apt-get install cowsay"

Cowsay takes a string as input and outputs, by default an ASCII cow, saying your string.
There are a number of different images supplied with Cowsay, which are listed in "/usr/share/cowsay/cows", and can be used with the "-f" argument, followed by the name of a ".cow" file.

Example:

 _______________
< Facepunch.com >
 ---------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Does anyone know of any other pointless/fun programs that can be run with no gui?

[TheFoxz]

[url]http://liquidweather.net/howto/index.php?id=74[/url]

play movies in ASCII in your terminal

[Eudoxia]

GNU Yes

$yes facepunch.com

[butre]

Naim - AIM client
EPIC4 - IRC client
AA3D - Ascii stereogram generator
aajm - Ascii Jugglemaster
ninvaders - Ascii Space invaders
Overkill - Ascii shooter game

Can't think of any other really good ones.

[PvtCupcakes]

[QUOTE=ButtsexV2;18143158]Naim - AIM client
[/QUOTE]

Pidgin has a CLI interface called Finch if you need MSN/Yahoo support or whatever.

[Bionic Apple]

[url=http://nmap.org/ncat/][b]Ncat[/b][/url]

It is a part of the Nmap suite of tools. The old version was known as netcat, in case you are familiar with it. For people unfamiliar with it, it is basically just a version of [i]cat[/i] for the network. Sounds simple and useless, but it lets you pipe, read, and write raw data through your network.

So, you can make a remote shell, stream video/audio, sync files, talk directly to web servers, chat with others, and more with this simple, flexible tool.

If I come up with some others, I'll mention them. If there is one thing I am sure of, it is there is a gargantuan amount of cool CLI programs.

[DrTaxi]

bb - nice demo made with ascii art. In many distributions' repositories nowadays.

[Eudoxia]

Midnight Commander
ncdu : Disk usage tool
Lynx, w3m & elinks : Text-based browsers
cmb : Bandwidth monitor
aria2 : Downloader
Alpine : Mail Client
moc : Music player
htop : System Monitor

[Doug52392]

nload: Network load monitor.
fortune: Random quotes and interesting tidbits. You can even set it up to load random Bash.org quotes.

[PvtCupcakes]

[QUOTE=Eudoxia;18408033]
ncdu : Disk usage tool
[/QUOTE]

This is so much cooler than normal du. :v:

Awesome it even sorts by size. And I don't have to do --max-depth=n or anything like that just to see the size of the folder and not worry about everything inside it.

[Zayfox]

The easter egg?

aptitude moo
aptitude -v moo
aptitude -vv moo
aptitude -vvv moo
aptitude -vvvv moo
aptitude -vvvvv moo
aptitude -vvvvvv moo
aptitude -vvvvvvv moo

Comes up with some random shit at the end.

[Ibutsu]

[QUOTE=TheFoxz;18135713][url]http://liquidweather.net/howto/index.php?id=74[/url]

play movies in ASCII in your terminal[/QUOTE]

I am so trying this. :dance:

[Eudoxia]

Is there some sort of ncurses-like interface like Midnight Commander to use when i shut down the Xwin?

Like the Borland C++ IDE, but every frame is a shell window?

[Bionic Apple]

You mean something like [url=http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/]Screen[/url]?

[Pretiacruento]

Pretty cool apps! I'm going to try them all! Keep'em coming :D

[aixxe]

That ASCII movie player looks awesome.