I am only days away from completing a rather large real-life project, and finally getting back some of the free time I have lost over the past few months. July is looking much more promising than June, and I already have a stack of things I need to make notes on, as well as an old-new desktop system that will need a rehaul.

In the mean time, I accidentally found a rather goofy stunt you can pull at the terminal. I was trying to get some information about cacaplas, one of the “screensavers” I mentioned for the terminal that comes with the caca libraries. I fat-fingered this line by mistake.

cacaplas > output.txt

I realized my mistake almost immediately afterward, but then started to wonder what was in the file. Leafpad showed it as a huge mess of escape codes, which makes sense, but the fun part was using cat to display the contents.

And of course, you get a sort of “recording” of what cacaplas spat out, for the few seconds it runs. (By the way, I wouldn’t let that run too long; the file gets very big, very fast. …)

Like I said, it’s just a quirky trick: not exceptionally functional, and not exceptionally interesting. Still, it’s vaguely cool. 😉