Easter eggs to celebrate Easter on Linux

Painted Tux Easter Egg

The famous Easter Eggs or easter eggs, apart from what we all already know, it is also how certain functions or things hidden in software and intentionally introduced by programmers are known. It is a small bubble, hidden menmens, or some graphic, etc. In video games it was also popular to introduce hidden features or functionalities that can be exploited if the tricks are known, such as god mode, infinite resources, etc.

There are even people who are dedicated to trying to detect this type of Easter eggs hidden by computer programs and systems, they are known as Easter egg hunters. As well, Linux is no stranger to this, and surely you already know many of them. It is a subject that we have already dealt with on several occasions in LxA if you read us frequently you will know it. Here are some of them so you can try them this holiday season ...

Here 5 eye-catching easter eggs that you can find in your GNU / Linux distribution (I will not comment on what appears for you to discover if you do not know it and it is the first time):

  • We are going to see a sequence of some well-known characters of a quite successful saga of the cinema if you write the following command, which really points to a web, so it is not something internal to Linux, but the graphical "show" based on text that it mounts in the terminal is still curious:
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
  • Another interesting thing you can see is the yes command, whose syntax is the following, replacing message with the word or phrase you want, no matter what it is (really not something surprising, if you know the function of yes ...):
yes mensaje
  • In the following case, with aptitude and apt-get (which you must have installed) run this script and see the messages that it responds to:
aptitude moo
aptitude -v moo
aptitude -vv moo
aptitude -vvv moo
aptitude -vvvv moo
aptitude -vvvvv moo
aptitude -vvvvvv moo
apt-get moo
  • Another of the classics is cowsay, another program that needs prior installation to work and you can replace message with the message you want or you can also use the second command that has a different effect:
cowsay mensaje
cowsay -f ghostbusters mensaje
  • Use Nmap with - to see rare characters in the output, that is, what nmap will do is replace some characters with similar ones. If you want, delete - on the first run and then add it to see the difference ...
nmap -oS - scanme.nmap.org

Have a good weekend!


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