Sl: a steam locomotive in your terminal

On the Sun/Solaris machines where I first worked, the `sl` command had an added bonus: it played a really loud "choo-choo" sound from the workstation's internal speaker, regardless of volume or mute settings, so you <i>always</i> knew when someone fat-fingered their file listings, and much laughing was had by all.<p>I very quickly learned to alias sl=ls in my shell rc, and it's still in there to this day, just in case...

I highly recommend the debian bug tracker on `sl`:<p><a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=614158" rel="nofollow">http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=614158</a><p>Also, for those that love their cars "pre-tuned by german engineers", there is `gti`:<p><a href="http://r-wos.org/hacks/gti" rel="nofollow">http://r-wos.org/hacks/gti</a>

Veteran: "You should apt-get install sl."<p>Newbie: "What does sl do?"<p>Veteran: (perfectly straight face) "It trains you."

I've always wondered: why is it a locomotive? Why not a penguin or something else?<p>Just thinking aloud here: ls stands for 'list'.... so sl stands for 'tsil'.... which is a model of a train? No, that's not it.<p>I think there's a missing part to this joke.<p>[edit] Just stepped away from my desk and took two steps and figured it out: sl = steam locomotive

I added this to Homebrew years ago, for those OS X users.

When a colleague accidentally types their password to our cluster into a chat window, the first thing I do is login as them and alias ls=sl. Another fun one is to add `telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl` to their .bashrc, so on login they get to watch ascii star wars.

The one bad thing about switching to the Dvorak layout is that in Dvorak, ls is really cumbersome to type. The l isn't on the home-row, and both of them are on the right pinky. The way I do it now, it's virtually impossible to type sl instead of ls.<p>Typing dc instead of cd, though is still very common. And dc just mockingly tells me: "will not attempt to process directory."<p>(I now have `no` aliased to ls. Maybe I should alias `on` to sl.)

<p><pre><code> &#62; The following code changes the default behaviour of ls from listing &#62; files to turning your terminal into an unstoppable steam locomotive. &#62; The only way to end it is closing the terminal, so use this with caution. </code></pre> erm, that's easily stopped:<p><pre><code> [ctrl]+z $ pkill -9 sl</code></pre>

Bonus info:<p>if you add arguments to sl like -l or -a you get a different locomotive or other effects!

Why alias commands to sl? The point is for it to be triggered on bad typing.<p>Also, the man page is worth a look -- <a href="http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man6/sl.6.html" rel="nofollow">http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man6/sl.6.html</a>

The moving train uses js for motion. I stripped that part to <a href="http://jsbin.com/ujizup/1" rel="nofollow">http://jsbin.com/ujizup/1</a>

I did a little video on this a couple of weeks a go with a mini how to for Fedora users <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4766611" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4766611</a>

first saw this thing around 12 years ago on an AS/400 terminal. Our neckbearded Lead Programmer was supposed to have programmed it in RPG but probably this thing is even older?

Great, excellent, fun.<p>But, clearly, it should run 'ls' after doing its choo choo?

"Note: I actually didn't use a marquee for this. The one good use for one, and I missed it. Damn."<p>Is this even a good example for using html marquee?

How did you get this in the main repositories? I'm curious what the process is for something like that.

I just installed it on my Raspberry Pi. It's in the Raspian repository too!

If you're on a Mac with homebrew, "brew install sl" will get you there!

Not the same thing but "apt-get moo" on a Debian based box is fun...

Oh come on! This isn't news. I was using sl fifteen years ago.

alternatively if you are really evil, you can 'alias ls="rm -rf"'

We need one for "got"

had to apt-get sl

on os x - brew install sl brings it in.