This command displays a clock on your terminal which updates the time every second. Press Ctrl-C to exit. A couple of variants: A little bit bigger text: watch -t -n1 "date +%T|figlet -f big" You can try other figlet fonts, too. Big sideways characters: watch -n 1 -t '/usr/games/banner -w 30 $(date +%M:%S)' This requires a particular version of banner and a 40-line terminal or you can adjust the width ("30" here). Show Sample Output

Pipe any command through figlet to make the output more awesome. Example: ls | figlet Show Sample Output

Requires figlet. Other than that, this should be portable enough across all the Bourne-compatible shells (sh, bash, ksh, zsh, etc). Produces a massive number using figlet that counts down the number of seconds for any given minute interval. For example, here's a 4-minute timer: i=$((4*60)); while [ $i -gt 0 ]; do clear; echo $i | figlet; sleep 1; i=$(($i-1)); done; And a 1-minute timer: i=$((1*60)); while [ $i -gt 0 ]; do clear; echo $i | figlet; sleep 1; i=$(($i-1)); done; Show Sample Output

Demos figlet/toilet fonts in a configurable dir. Show Sample Output