In honor of New Year’s Day, today we’re going to talk about more silly commands.

The first one is called yes

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ yes
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y

And it keeps going and going and going! It’s the Energizer Bunny of commands!

To stop it, hit control-C.  That’ll stop the Bunny, er, Y from streaming on your terminal.

So what’s this command for? Other than to fill your screen up with more y’s than should be legal. Well, remember from this post the xargs command? Some commands insist you sit there and type y over and over and over before they’ll finish. This command lets you do:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ yes | xargs annoying_command

So you can be lazy and not type it over and over and… did I mention over? Then when that command finishes, your yes command will exit.

Linux® has lots of silly commands.  Another one has no redeeming feature at all. Aside from pure amusement. It’s called fortune.

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ fortune
Long life is in store for you.
Alpha:~ computerlamp$ fortune
Q:    What do you say to a New Yorker with a job?
A:    Big Mac, fries and a Coke, please!
Alpha:~ computerlamp$ fortune
So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie;
and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street pops its head
into the shop. "What! no soap?" So he died, and she very imprudently
married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Grand
Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all
fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran
out at the heels of their boots.
        -- Samuel Foote
Alpha:~ computerlamp$ fortune
You may worry about your hair-do today, but tomorrow much peanut butter will
be sold.

It even has a man page. You can type man fortune and see the flags it has too.

For example, if you only want short fortunes, then you could do:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$  fortune -s
How apt the poor are to be proud.
		-- William Shakespeare, "Twelfth-Night"

If you’re only interested in long fortunes, then you would do:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$  fortune -l
At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement,
especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously
-- I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being
in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason.
		-- John Keats

The fortune command pulls it’s sayings from many different files. If you want to know what file the fortune came from, you would do:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$  fortune -c
(riddles)
%
Q:	How do you play religious roulette?
A:	You stand around in a circle and blaspheme and see who gets
	struck by lightning first.

As you can see, not all of the fortunes are polite.

So there you have it. Two silly commands found in Linux®.