Somebody mentioned seashells.io to me. A nifty little service that let’s you pipe output from your shell’s command line directly to the web.
What better use for this than to pipe random funny quotes?
TL;DR
If you want to check out the output – just go here https://seashells.io/v/FCPsK8Sh. It’s running from my shell – so may die any moment.
Show me how!
First, you need to install a couple of packages.
cowsayprints an ascii image to the screen, that looks like a cow ( or one of the specified animals).fortuneprints a random quote or a “fortune-cookie” type message from a collection of quotesfortune-minis needed on some systems (like Ubuntu), as fortune only comes with the engine, not the db of quotes. Not needed on mac.seashellis a client for seashells.io website. You don’t have to install it, you can just use netstat. It’s up to you. But you do need python & pip available.
sudo apt-get install -y cowsay fortune fortunes-min
# If you are on macOSX, brew is your friend
brew install cowsay fortune
# if you want seashells client instead of nc
pip install seashells
Now that we have prerequisites, let’s actually use the magic of pipe to combine all the tool togeather!
Note: The choice of animals available to
cowsayvaries by distribution . For instance, macOSx hasblowfishbutubunutu‘s package, doesn’t
If you use fish shell
# Let's wrap some functionality into a handy function
function random_quote
set animal (random choice {default,dragon,dragon-and-cow,elephant,moose,stegosaurus,tux,vader})
fortune -s | cowsay -f $animal
end
# a trick to pipe from loop to another process. Fish only.
fish -c 'while true; sleep 15; random_quote; end' | nc seashells.io 1337
If you use bash shell
random_quote() {
choices=("dragon" "dragon-and-cow" "elephant" "moose" "stegosaurus" "tux" "vader")
animal=${choices[$RANDOM % ${#choices[@]} ]}
fortune -s | cowsay -f $animal
}
while true; do sleep 15; random_quote; done | nc seashells.io 1337
Also published on Medium.
