Mac Terminal Easter Eggs

Mac Terminal Easter Eggs

By ghost | 9327 Reads |

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This is a brief guide to many of the secret functions of the "Terminal" program built into Mac OS X. There are ALOT of easter eggs in Mac OS X but I thought I would concentrate on just the Terminal ones. I'm sure that there are loads more in Terminal but these are some of the fun ones that I know of. And no [all you windows users] silly fun and games is not all that Macs provide. They also provide a better blah blah…..than Windows. :]

1. Open up Applications in a new Finder Window.
2. Open the Utilities folder.
3. Open Terminal.

Built In Games:

Step 1

In a new Terminal session type:

"ls /usr/share/emacs/21.2/lisp/play"

This will give you a list of games that can be played in terminal, ranging from Tetris to a strange Psychotherapist…

Step 2

Type "emacs" Then "esc+x" Now type the name of the game you wish to play. Press Enter/Return.

Success!

Now you can waste away many hours pretending you are somehow programming when you are actually having a sneaky game of "Gomoku" [what on earth is Gomoku?]

Repeat Step 2 process with any game you wish.

Lord Of The Rings:

Open a Terminal session again.

Type:

cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history | grep "LOTR"

This will give you an interesting plot to LOTR.

Important Dates in History:

Open another Terminal session.

Type:

cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history

If you ever wanted to know when Eskimo Pie was patented or when "Striptease" was introduced, this rather um comprehensive timeline will give you everything you ever needed to know.

"Old Skool" text based game:

Type:

"emacs -batch -l dunnet"

This gives you a text based game very similar to the likes of that of MUD.

Enjoy!