Useless Linux “Tips”
Here is a good list of six gnome-terminal commands which you really wont need and you probably won’t ever use them unless out of curiosity (like I did). But sure tell me if you do use them and why in the comments at the bottom of the page.
1. Watching Star-Wars
No, no, no don’t get me wrong there’s nothing wrong with watching Star-Wars but when you can watch a text based version of Episode VI IV New Hope from the terminal it gets a little ridiculous (but it is quite clever).
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
2. A Terminal Fire
This is the least warming thing I can think of, if you’re seriously looking at getting warm then you might as well hug your processor for all it’s worth.
sudo apt-get install libaa-binaafire
3. E-mail
This is where I completely drop myself in it, I wrote an article a little while ago which implied that this was useful. I now see the error of my ways, it is quite simply sending an e-mail through the Terminal. To see my article and how to do it go to: http://www.turtleblog.co.uk/2009/04/send-e-mail-from-terminal-using-gmail/
4. Disable X Restart
Why would anyone want to disable the actually useful Ctrl+Alt+Backspace key combination to restart X in Gnome? If you do want to this visit: http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-disable-ctrlaltbackspace-from-restarting-x-in-gnome.html
5. Twitter
Okay so tell me this, who would regularly update their twitter status via their Terminal? Well with this code you know can! But you wouldn’t want to.
curl -u user:password -d status=”Your status message” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
6. Yes
Here’s a big one, in the terminal type ‘yes’ and it will continuously repeat the letter y until you press Ctrl+C. Does anyone know its purpose? If so please a comment below.
yes
Tags: Linux, star-wars, terminal, tips, useless
Yes–output a string repeatedly until killed. Used for lazy people to say yes to numerous prompts like while running a ./config script.
the use of the ‘yes’ command is to pipe it into another command that requires you to answer y to one or more questions. (still pretty useless)
$ yes | command_here
Generally yes is used as a pipe to answer a question that is repeatedly asked, such as “Are you sure you want to remove read-only file XYZ?”. Syntax would be “yes | rm -r XYZ*”
Haha that was a good read. Thanks for the interesting, yet useless tips.
Actually, yes is quite good in some situations, as already mentioned by others. One interesting feature of yes is that you can feed it a parameter which then is used as output. Try “yes no”.
The first “Tip” is not a Linux tip it is a telnet tip.
You can connect to that telnet server on any OS that has a telnet client.
`yes` can also be used with a parameter to repeat that phrase repeatedly. For example, `yes hi` will print the word hi over and over again instead of the letter y. When piped to another program, `yes` will print until it is killed, which can actually be quite useful.
@Don – Yes true you could have accessed no.1 with any telnet client, it just seemed a bigger thing with linux
@Andrew – Yes, I think I was wrong about the yes command, sorry! As seen by the many other comments it does have it’s uses
>list of six gnome-terminal commands
Damn! I guess these are gnome only. I’ll have to rethink my desktop choice. It would be my luck that these would also only work on Ubuntu. Since that is the only real Linux distribution.
I thought A New Hope was episode IV?
…Yes it is…
ehm. Why bother starting up X to twitter if I can do it from my terminal?
because X doesn’t take that long to start…
Would you turn your computer on just for 1 tweet? (If so then I suppose it could be useful)
Well, NOT starting X and all the rest of it takes a lot less time, I promise!
If I could surf with pictures in a good way terminalwize, I propably would.
I guess I more like to write than do this pointy-klicky-thingie… The main reason for having X for me is watching pretty pictures and movies. Handling text stuff using a text media seems pretty logical to me, somehow.
Right now, I’m bothered enough by not knowing how to blog via the terminal that I’m writing a file system interface to do it…