Fun Terminal Commands

Hello, everybody! Today I am going to show you just little minor and fun things to do in terminal.

1.) Open your Dash, which is pictured below.

2.) Search “Terminal” and click on the first icon.

3.) Write the following command, and/or copy and paste it.

sudo apt-get install cowsay sl fortune xcowsay cmatrix

4.) Wait for the download to complete and when it is done then you can begin to have some fun.

Let’s begin 🙂

1. SL (Steam Locomotive)
   • What is it?
     • SL is basically just a cool little train that gets shown to the user.
   • SL has 4 different parameters along with it. Parameters are seperated by the command with a space. This means we have 5 options in total:
2. • • sl
     • sl -a
     • sl -F
     • sl -l
     • sl -c
   • Usage
     • sl or sl –parameter (Replacing parameter with a, F, l, or c)
3. cowsay
   • What is it?
     • cowsay is just a ASCII cow which can take an input and display it.
   •  Usage
     • cowsay any text you want the cow to say
4. fortune
   • What is it?
     • fortune is a random message that you would get from a fortune cookie for example.
   • Usage
     • fortune
     • Plain and simple, that is all you type and press enter, then it spits out a fortune! 🙂
5. xcowsay
   • What is it?
     • xcowsay is literally the same thing as cowsay just a graphical one instead. So instead of the cow being drawn in ASCII, it is now drawn with a picture of some sort drawn randomly on the screen for a short time.
   • Usage
     • xcowsay any text you want the cow to say
6. cmatrix
   • What is it?
     • cmatrix is basically a rference from the movie Matrix. Essentially it is just a cool ASCII splash of random numbers and text.
   • Usage
     • cmatrix
     • You can cancel the script by pressing control C (ctrl + C) on the keyboard. That also cancels other scripts that are continuous.

Combining Commands Example

Essentially, you can take commands with a lot of things in terminal and combine them together. I will just show you a few here today! Let’s get started…

fortune | cowsay

or

fortune | xcowsay

The two commands above will be pictured below to make sure you are entering them correctly.

I hope this taught you a little bit of what you can do with terminal. Enjoy! 🙂

Do NOT think this is the only things that you can do with the terminal by all means there is so much more you can do. Just take that into your own hands and take a look around google, the possibilities are endless.