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It shows the complete ascii table, and it works in BSD too, not only in Linux.
This is especially useful to get crazy stuff like space characters copied to your pasteboard correctly.
Source: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.functions
You can use "decode()" in a similar manner:
python -c 'print "68656c6c6f".decode("hex")'
This command will tell you your fortune, with a nice Ascii Art animal, and it is colorized
You need cowsay, toilet and fortune installed.
On Ubuntu this is:
sudo apt-get install cowsay toilet fortune
Debian:
aptitude install cowsay toilet fortune
Change YOUR TEXT HERE to the text you want.
On figlet -f banner, you can change it to any figlet font you have installed.
One variant for Star Wars fans could be this:
while [ 1 ]; do clear; echo 'Star Wars' | figlet -f starwars -t | while IFS="\n" read l; do echo "$l"; sleep 0.01; done; done
NOTICE: You need to install figlet.
On Ubuntu, this command is:
sudo apt-get install figlet
On Debian, this command is:
aptitude install figlet
If you're going to use od, here's how to suppress the labels at the beginning. Also, it doesn't output the \x, hence the sed command at the end. Remove it for space separated hex values instead
Just use "od" and it can also dump in decimal or octal.
(use -t x1 and not just -x or it confuses the byte order)
There is a load of other formatting options, I'm not sure if you can turn off the address at the start of the line.
Here's a version that uses perl. If you'd like a trailing newline:
perl -pe 's/(.)/sprintf("\\x%x", ord($1))/eg; END {print "\n"}'
Same as another one I saw, just with a cleaner sed command
Edit: updated the sed command to use the [[:xdigit:]] character class - more portable between locales
Note that it will have a newline inserted after every 32 characters of input, due to the output of xxd
Can be installed in the root crontab if you want it to update your motd.
If not on ubuntu you need to change /usr/share/cowsay/cows/* to the location of your cow files.
Displays a scrolling banner which loops until you hit Ctrl-C to terminate it.
Make sure you finish your banner message with a space so it will loop nicely.
Removes ANSI color and end of line codes to the [{attr1};...;{attrn}m format.
Doesn't fail for percent sign now.
I've corrected the function. My octal conversion formula was completely wrong. Thanks to pgas at http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/071 for setting me straight. The new function is from pgas and is very fast.