BashItOut

Random Fun and the Busy Linux Geek

Sometimes you just need your workstation to look like it’s doing something. Whether it’s so you look like you’re actually busy compiling and need a sword fight like the XKCD guys, or just just because you can.

Grab a terminal and enter this command…

$ hexdump -C < /dev/urandom | grep "ca fe" 

…and you’ll be presented with a beautiful scrolling display of console randomness, with a touch of colour:

If your PC’s high on entropy and that’s scrolling a bit too fast, why not throttle it a little with the Linux pv command.

You may need to install it first, on Ubuntu / Debian Flavoured Linux, that should be something like:

$ sudo apt-get install pv

Then just pipe your randomness into pv instead of grep:

$ hexdump -C < /dev/urandom | pv -q --rate-limit 75

Enjoy! ;)

Tags: Linux, Fun