For those who believe that Linux Command Line is boring and there isn’t any fun, then you’re wrong here are the articles on Linux, that shows how funny and naughty is Linux..
- [20 Funny Commands of Linux or Linux is Fun in Terminal][1]
- [6 Interesting Funny Commands of Linux (Fun in Terminal)][2]
- [Fun in Linux Terminal – Play with Word and Character Counts][3]
Here in this article, I will be discussing about a small utility called “lolcat” – Which produce rainbow of colors in terminal.
Lolcat Command to Output Rainbow of Colors for Terminal
#### What is lolcat? ####
Lolcat is an utility for Linux, BSD and OSX which concatenates like similar to [cat command][4] and adds rainbow coloring to it. Lolcat is primarily used for rainbow coloring of text in Linux Terminal.
### Installation of Lolcat in Linux ###
**1. Lolcat utility is available in the repository of lots of Linux distributions, but the available version bit older. Alternatively you can download and install latest version of lolcat from git repository.**
Lolcat is a ruby gem hence it is essential to have latest version of RUBY installed on your system.
# apt-get install ruby [On APT based Systems]
# yum install ruby [On Yum based Systems]
# dnf install ruby [On DNF based Systems]
Once ruby package has been installed, make sure to verify the version of ruby installed.
# ruby --version
ruby 2.1.5p273 (2014-11-13) [x86_64-linux-gnu]
**2. Next download and install the most recent version of lolcat from the git repository using following commands.**
**5. 3. Use lolcat to display codes of a script file as:**
# lolcat test.sh
Display Codes with Lolcat
**6. Pipeline lolcat with figlet command. Figlet is a utility which displays large characters made up of ordinary screen characters. We can pipeline the output of figlet with lolcat to make the output colorful as:**
turtle tux unipony unipony-smaller vader vader-koala www
Output of cowsay pipelined with lolcat and ‘gnu‘ cowfile is used.
# cowsay -f gnu ☛ Tecmint ☚ is the best Linux Resource Available online | lolcat
Cowsay with Lolcat
**Note**: You can use lolcat with any other command in pipeline and get colored output in terminal.
**10. You may create alias for the most frequently used commands to get command output in rainbow of colors. You can alias ‘ls -l‘ command which is used for long list the contents of directory as below.**
# alias lolls="ls -l | lolcat"
# lolls
Alias Commands with Colorful
You may create alias for any command as suggested above. To create permanent alias, you have to add the relevant code (above code for ls -l alias) to ~/.bashrc file and also make sure to logout and login back for the changes to be taken into effect.
That’s all for now. I would like to know if you were aware of lolcat previously? Did you like the post? And suggestion and feedback is welcome in the comment section below. Like and share us and help us get spread.
