7 ms·

Show HN: ASCII Animals in Your Terminal

62 points by ivolo 14y ago

raldi 14y ago
curl -s [url] | sh Please don't train people to do that.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - ivolo 14y ago
    you guys don't trust me? :( I prefer: sudo sh -c "curl -s [url] | sh"
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - aidenn0 14y ago
      It's not just an issue of trust. We'd have to trust you and github and anyone capable of hacking into your github account. Also there are just some good habits to have. I don't give my passwords to people, even if I trust them.
- shawnz 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 http://animals.ivolo.me/?index=13
- fletchowns 14y ago
  npm used to suggest something similar as an easy way to install... curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh
  - juan_juarez 14y 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.
    - delllapssuck 14y ago
      And today it's Javascript. Same problem. Running someone else's code without reading it first. Why? Because people want to see a "doodle" or some other silly graphic. Truthfully, it's gotten worse: "Please enable Javascript." "You need to enable Javascript to use this website." (9 times out of 10, that's a lie.) In the 1980's, it was telling people to run some ANSI codes through printf to see a blinking Christmas Tree.
      - sciurus 14y ago
        Your web browser is designed to sandbox and safely run code. Your shell isn't. (People are working on it though, see for example http://berrange.com/posts/2012/01/17/building-application-sandboxes-with-libvirt-lxc-kvm/ http://berrange.com/posts/2012/01/17/building-application-sa...)
        delllapssuck 14y ago
        I can "sandbox" code using the shell far easier than I can control what a "modern browser" can do. Because I know the shell and my OS better than I know a "modern browser". "People are working on it..." C'mon, man. This sounds pathetic. You can learn to use the shell safely. How do you think sysadmins do their jobs? Or you can pretend the shell is too difficult and something to be feared. The simple fact is _you_ control the shell. You don't expose it to the world (unless you're playing games with CGI or doing like the OP said: feeding it random bytes from the internet). You can read the code for a basic shell (e.g. rc, sh, dash). You can modify and compile it yourself. You can write your own. CS students routinely write their own shells as part of the curriculum. A "shell" is something relatively simple. You really think you're ridiculously complex "modern browser" is "safe"? Safer than your shell? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8cQ0yU89sk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8cQ0yU89sk When your use the shell, you trust the people who provide your OS's kernel, the compiler, libraries and userland and those 3d party applications, if any, you choose to run. That's already a lot of people and a lot of code. When you use a "modern browser" who do you trust? I can't even begin to quantify it. As a very well respected cryptographer once wrote, security may be less a matter of reducing privilege than of reducing the amount of trusted code. The only reason you even have a concet of "privilege" is because it's a relic of shared computing. Everyone has their own computer now. There's no such thing as "root" in Plan 9. Compare the LOC in a basic shell with the LOC in your web browser.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Among my biggest gripes about RVM (the Ruby enVironment Manager): that's the install method. https://rvm.io/rvm/install/ 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 14y ago
    You may be interested in https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv
    - dredmorbius 14y ago
      Thanks.
fletchowns 14y ago
Reminds me of telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl (can't believe this is still up after all these years)
- makmanalp 14y 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 14y ago
Also similar to cowsay[1]: [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowsay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowsay
jewel 14y 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 http://thesteve.org/up/elephant.txt
- dhimes 14y ago
  You had developers do WHATTTTT????
thebigshane 14y ago
skip right to the purdy pictures: https://raw.github.com/ivolo/animals/master/public/assets/animals.saved 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 http://www.heartnsoul.com/ascii_art/ascii_animals_indx.htm
meanJim 14y ago
I think it broke, I get this animation now: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd&#62 http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> <style type="text/css"> html, body, iframe { margin: 0; padding: 0; height: 100%; } iframe { display: block; width: 100%; border: none; } </style> <title>Application Error</title></head> </head> <body> <iframe src="//s3.amazonaws.com/heroku_pages/error.html"> <p>Application Error</p> </iframe> </body> </html> hehe
sciurus 14y ago
Speaking of ASCII art in your terminal, $ apt-get install sl $ /usr/games/sl
- bayesbiol 14y ago
  Yay for steam locomotive! I think of it as a handy reminder from your sys-admin "don't drink and ssh!"
  - peterwwillis 14y ago
    That same sys-admin probably won the Crash And Compile drinking game at DEF CON. Don't listen to him.
- pooriaazimi 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
/usr/games/cowsay -f `ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows | shuf -n1` `/usr/games/fortune`
makmanalp 14y ago
And if you want to generate ascii text: http://www.figlet.org/ http://www.figlet.org/
xyzzyb 14y 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-formatter 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.

62 points by ivolo 14y ago

raldi 14y ago

curl -s [url] | sh Please don't train people to do that.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- ivolo 14y ago
  you guys don't trust me? :( I prefer: sudo sh -c "curl -s [url] | sh"
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - aidenn0 14y ago
    It's not just an issue of trust. We'd have to trust you and github and anyone capable of hacking into your github account. Also there are just some good habits to have. I don't give my passwords to people, even if I trust them.
shawnz 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 http://animals.ivolo.me/?index=13
fletchowns 14y ago
npm used to suggest something similar as an easy way to install... curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh
- juan_juarez 14y 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.
  - delllapssuck 14y ago
    And today it's Javascript. Same problem. Running someone else's code without reading it first. Why? Because people want to see a "doodle" or some other silly graphic. Truthfully, it's gotten worse: "Please enable Javascript." "You need to enable Javascript to use this website." (9 times out of 10, that's a lie.) In the 1980's, it was telling people to run some ANSI codes through printf to see a blinking Christmas Tree.
    - sciurus 14y ago
      Your web browser is designed to sandbox and safely run code. Your shell isn't. (People are working on it though, see for example http://berrange.com/posts/2012/01/17/building-application-sandboxes-with-libvirt-lxc-kvm/ http://berrange.com/posts/2012/01/17/building-application-sa...)
      - delllapssuck 14y ago
        I can "sandbox" code using the shell far easier than I can control what a "modern browser" can do. Because I know the shell and my OS better than I know a "modern browser". "People are working on it..." C'mon, man. This sounds pathetic. You can learn to use the shell safely. How do you think sysadmins do their jobs? Or you can pretend the shell is too difficult and something to be feared. The simple fact is _you_ control the shell. You don't expose it to the world (unless you're playing games with CGI or doing like the OP said: feeding it random bytes from the internet). You can read the code for a basic shell (e.g. rc, sh, dash). You can modify and compile it yourself. You can write your own. CS students routinely write their own shells as part of the curriculum. A "shell" is something relatively simple. You really think you're ridiculously complex "modern browser" is "safe"? Safer than your shell? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8cQ0yU89sk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8cQ0yU89sk When your use the shell, you trust the people who provide your OS's kernel, the compiler, libraries and userland and those 3d party applications, if any, you choose to run. That's already a lot of people and a lot of code. When you use a "modern browser" who do you trust? I can't even begin to quantify it. As a very well respected cryptographer once wrote, security may be less a matter of reducing privilege than of reducing the amount of trusted code. The only reason you even have a concet of "privilege" is because it's a relic of shared computing. Everyone has their own computer now. There's no such thing as "root" in Plan 9. Compare the LOC in a basic shell with the LOC in your web browser.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
dredmorbius 14y ago
Among my biggest gripes about RVM (the Ruby enVironment Manager): that's the install method. https://rvm.io/rvm/install/ 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 14y ago
  You may be interested in https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    Thanks.

fletchowns 14y ago

Reminds me of telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl (can't believe this is still up after all these years)

makmanalp 14y 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 14y ago

Also similar to cowsay[1]: [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowsay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowsay

jewel 14y 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 http://thesteve.org/up/elephant.txt

dhimes 14y ago
You had developers do WHATTTTT????

thebigshane 14y ago

skip right to the purdy pictures: https://raw.github.com/ivolo/animals/master/public/assets/animals.saved 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 http://www.heartnsoul.com/ascii_art/ascii_animals_indx.htm

meanJim 14y ago

I think it broke, I get this animation now: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd&#62 http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> <style type="text/css"> html, body, iframe { margin: 0; padding: 0; height: 100%; } iframe { display: block; width: 100%; border: none; } </style> <title>Application Error</title></head> </head> <body> <iframe src="//s3.amazonaws.com/heroku_pages/error.html"> <p>Application Error</p> </iframe> </body> </html> hehe

sciurus 14y ago

Speaking of ASCII art in your terminal, $ apt-get install sl $ /usr/games/sl

bayesbiol 14y ago
Yay for steam locomotive! I think of it as a handy reminder from your sys-admin "don't drink and ssh!"
- peterwwillis 14y ago
  That same sys-admin probably won the Crash And Compile drinking game at DEF CON. Don't listen to him.
pooriaazimi 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago

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

makmanalp 14y ago

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

xyzzyb 14y 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-formatter 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.