I used to send fortune to a printer display. It did backfire as some of the fortune quotes can be offensive if they get cut-off by the display. Flags are required to do the true one-liners. Nobody actually got upset as much more offensive things were shouted across the room daily [1] but leadership suggested it should be avoided.
[1] - The Oracle system pw was intentionally as offensive as it could be and people would forget it on purpose so it could be shouted across the room. I have good memories of that place. It was laid back and the people were fun. It was acquired and parted out by a bank.
I’d wager there was more going on than just this. He was under performing, or failing in some other way and this was just the excuse to get rid of him.
Well that doesn't seem reasonable or a valid excuse for firing someone (or at least in places with a minimum of employee protection). What problem does it cause if you customise your shell prompt?
I have a hard time finding where I land with this Easter egg.
Someone who doesn't appreciate a little fun, probably won't have cowsay installed on their controller
And yet... I've been toting around a role that's basically a list of packages to ensure are absent from the controller/managed hosts. Cowsay has been a long time resident
For such a little piece of fun, I 'have' to maintain a lot unnecessarily (if I want useful output)
I think this not being a "whoa neat" thing I encounter every now and then... but something I regularly endure, is part of it. We aren't all solo administrators
I use this very often with my kids (3yo twins). It's fun for them to see animals, dragons and other things popping up on the white screen. I usually ask them what they what they want see, prepare it and then let them press on enter to display it. Simpler things e.g. 'gnu' or 'fox' they can type themselves.
next project: use sed (or your favourite shell/scripting language) as a filter in front of ponysay, to rewrite "anybody"->"anypony", "somebody"->"somepony", etc.
For more practical use try espeak, I often use it in long running scripts that runs somewhere in background, e.g. it tells me when keyboard get disconnected because of the soldering iron or when it's time for dinner, or a pomodoro timer, or reminds me I should turn off IM when I put new work in time tracking app.
That's one of my top uses for espeak. I have a script setup as /home/bin/work that looks like this:
#!/bin/bash
sleepTime="20m" # default is 20 minutes
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo "using sleepTime = $sleepTime"
else
echo "using sleepTime = $1"
sleepTime=$1
fi
reset ; date ; echo "You should be working ($sleepTime)" ; sleep $sleepTime ; reset ; echo "Time to take a break!" ; while true ;
do
espeak-ng "Time to take a break"; sleep 3s ;
done
This was inspired by another HN poster from a post a few years ago. I'd credit them, but I don't remember exactly who it was now.
That said, I'm sure this script could be improved considerably, but for my purposes it suffices.
Definitely be careful about using fortune in a corporate environment or public space if you don't know what dat files you are using or you might just get an extremely unwelcome surprise.
I was practicing a presentation and used to use fortune all the time. I forget exactly what it output but I remember being absolutely mortified about what could have happened if that had popped up during an internal company tech talk.
Kudos to brew for keeping unsuspecting people safe
> fortune | cowsay
in to my .bashrc. Every time I open a new terminal I get a cow telling me a fortune. I have done this for about 10 years now and it just feels right.