Pulling ideas from this unix.stackexchange.com Q&A about generating "hollywood" style terminal output.
The Slow Type
This script produces that delayed typing like effect you see in movies. Where the computer prints things in the terminal at some really awful and slow rate.
Save the following to a file named
while IFS= read -r line; do
for (( offset = 0 ; offset < length ; offset++ )); do
printf '%s' "$char"
if (( bol )) && [[ "$char" == " " ]]; then
if (( length == 0 )); then
sleep 0.$(( RANDOM % 3 + 2 ))
sleep 0.$(( RANDOM % 7 + 3 ))
Set execute permissions on the file
chmod +x hollywood
And then pipe it the output from
dmesg to give it a large chunk of snazzy looking text to slowly print on the screen:
dmesg | hollywood
The Hex Dump
This dumps hex data to the screen. Looks impressive but is largely unintelligible to the masses.
hexdump -C /dev/urandom | GREP_COLOR='1;32' grep --color=auto 'ca fe
Numbers. Numbers everywhere.
tr -c "[:digit:]" " " < /dev/urandom | dd cbs=$COLUMNS conv=unblock | GREP_COLOR="1;32" grep --color "[^ ]"
Unfortunately, with that one there isn't a good way to control the speed.
There's a better version of this available view Homebrew called cmatrix. You can install and run it with:
brew install cmatrix