Show HN: ASCII Animals in Your Terminal

http://ivolo.me/ascii-animals-the-perfect-loading-indicator/

by ivolo • 14 years ago

62 29 14 years ago

raldi• 14 years ago

    curl -s [url] | sh

Please don't train people to do that.

shawnz• 14 years ago

Honestly... that is an extraordinarily strange (and dangerous) model for executing things in a terminal. It's not a web browser!

I mean, cool idea, I guess... but I don't think I'd ever execute it as documented on a machine I own. Sorry!

DanHulton• 14 years ago

Yeah, I NEARLY ran that second command, then I saw what it did and my heart did a backflip. "Seriously, I'm being asked to do that on HN?"

Then I came here to see if anyone else had.

marquis• 14 years ago

I was going to run the second one in a VM, after downloading the code and taking a look: it recursively grabs the url so it's really not safe.. the first one is ok though if you download it first, it's just ascii. http://animals.ivolo.me/?index=13

fletchowns2• 14 years ago

npm used to suggest something similar as an easy way to install...

  curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh

juan_juarez• 14 years ago

That's a different case. Installing software implicitly means you trust an installer. Throwing random data into a shell prompt to see an ASCII cat is the sort of shit that gave my dad email viruses in the late 90s.

ketralnis• 14 years ago

Which is worse. It certainly doesn't mean that it's okay here.

nshepperd• 14 years ago

...

And it's not even over https.

dredmorbius2• 14 years ago

Among my biggest gripes about RVM (the Ruby enVironment Manager): that's the install method.

https://rvm.io/rvm/install/

But SRSLY?!!!!!!!

How does RVM work? By throwing a shit-ton of hooks into your shell environment.

That shit right there made me put the brakes on and try to grok the hell out of what the tool did right there.

Upshot: it's useful and seems to do what it promises. Still bugs the crap out of me though.

The animated ASCII stuff? "nobody" account on a VM.

codehotter• 14 years ago

You may be interested in https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv

fletchowns2• 14 years ago

Reminds me of

  telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

(can't believe this is still up after all these years)

makmanalp2• 14 years ago

My god, I remember being spellbound by this for hours as a novice, after learning my first few shell commands and managing to get the damn modem to work on linux.

gpmcadam• 14 years ago

Also similar to cowsay[1]:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowsay

jewel• 14 years ago

There are practical uses for ASCII animals. When I built a command-line tool to let the developers sign out for a 15 minute break at my last job (because doing it via the AS/400 interface was a big hassle), I used a big, yellow elephant [1]. This made it easy to remember to hit the enter key to go back on the clock when they got back to their computer.

[1]: I think it was this one: http://thesteve.org/up/elephant.txt

dhimes• 14 years ago

You had developers do WHATTTTT????

thebigshane• 14 years ago

skip right to the purdy pictures: https://raw.github.com/ivolo/animals/master/public/assets/an... [400kb text file download]

which apparently are all borrowed from here: http://www.heartnsoul.com/ascii_art/ascii_animals_indx.htm

sciurus3• 14 years ago

Speaking of ASCII art in your terminal,

  $ apt-get install sl
  $ /usr/games/sl

bayesbiol• 14 years ago

Yay for steam locomotive! I think of it as a handy reminder from your sys-admin "don't drink and ssh!"

peterwwillis• 14 years ago

That same sys-admin probably won the Crash And Compile drinking game at DEF CON. Don't listen to him.

pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

`sl` also takes arguments, which change the shape and size of that damn locomotive: -a -l -F

It's a fun, masochistic joke, but I seriously encourage everyone to install it (it's available on Homebrew, if you're an OS X user). Every time you do an `sl` you must immediately resolve to be more careful when doing things on terminal. It `ls` is harmless, but what if it was `rm`?

mixmastamyk• 14 years ago

Neat, but it seems to make an http request for every frame. Unclear if requests caches that, but I did get a socket error on KeyboardInterrupt so I don't think so.

anveo• 14 years ago

/usr/games/cowsay -f `ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows | shuf -n1` `/usr/games/fortune`

makmanalp2• 14 years ago

And if you want to generate ascii text: http://www.figlet.org/

xyzzyb• 14 years ago

My favorite (useful!) ASCII terminal animal is the Nyan Cat RSpec formatter. I love that little guy.

http://mattsears.com/articles/2011/11/16/nyan-cat-rspec-form...

He makes the tests slower, but I still have him check my entire suite of specs at least once a day.

Show HN: ASCII Animals in Your Terminal

Related Stories