Fun Terminal Commands Every Linux User Should Try

Accessing Maps from the terminal with MapSCII

Requirements

• Telnet installed

• Internet Connection
• Firewall is disabled

You can do this on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X or Windows with an app like PuTTY or the Windows 10 Linux bash shell or any Os that supports telnet.

Open terminal and write the command below.

 telnet mapscii.me  

Hit enter and you're ready to browse and enjoy MapSCII. Navigate using the keyboard or mouse. Use the following keys on your keyboard

• Arrow keys: up, down, right, left
• A to zoom in
• Z to zoom out
• C toggles ASCII mode on/off

You can also click and drag and hold on the map with your cursor.
If your connection dropped without a reason, reconnect with

 telnet -E mapscii.me  

and use only cursors, A and Z to navigate.

The Mapscii project is open source and you can install it locally if you'd like. Check out their project here on GitHub.

The Dancing ASCII Party Parrot
Requirements

• Curl installed

• Internet connection

If you've already watched star wars in your terminal here's another one you can watch but this time it's a dancing parrot. To see the goofy command line parrot, all you need to do is run this command in your terminal but you must have curl installed in your system.

 curl parrot.live  

This is what it looks like:

When you've finished enjoying the head bobbing parrot, use Ctrl + C to stop the dance. It uses the curl command to stream ASCII from the server 'parrot.live'.
If you scroll up your terminal window, you'll realize it's just a ton of text that is scrolling down the window which gives the illusion of a dancing parrot head.
Here is the original source and if you're interested in taking it to the next level, visit this Github page.

Rickroll the terminal With Curl

Bash script which rickrolls your terminal by playing Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” with ANSI 256-color coded UTF-8 characters + audio (if available).

With this you'll get a full ASCII rendition of the infamous Rick Astley video but to make it even better it is complete with audio(for some).

So be sure to have your headphones or speakers volume turned up. You can first give it a try and then start rickrolling your friends.

Run this command in your terminal. This is the clandestine command you can give to your friends.

 curl -s -L https://bit.ly/38iggp1 | bash  

The link will expand to the following github URL

 curl -s -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/keroserene/rickrollrc/master/roll.sh | bash  

NOTE: It is not a recommended practice to copy and run random scripts from the internet for security reasons. But this code is open source and if you have any particular privacy or security concerns or are just curious to see how it works you can view the code on Github here.

If you really want to have fun and have access to someone's .bash_profile you can alias this command to a common command. As a sys admin you can also use this as a motd. This allows you to troll everyone who logs into the server or box. I can't stop imagining how much fun that would be!!!

Would be a good prank for April Fools Day btw!!! and on your boss only if he/she is not tech savvy.
I hope you enjoy the 80's dance moves in ASCII.

xeyes
Watches what you do and reports to the boss.

It's not only for fun. It is a useful utility if you have a big screen and a small cursor. 
The purpose of this program is to let you follow the mouse pointer which is sometimes hard to see.

Run this command in your terminal

 xeyes  

You can use different options with this command that can be found in its man page.

It is very useful on multi-headed computers, where monitors are separated by some distance, and if someone (say teacher at school) wants to present something on the screen, the others on their monitors can easily follow the mouse with xeyes.

Oneko
Displays a cute cat chasing your mouse cursor.
So hilarious! I could do this all day.
Installation
Ubuntu
Open terminal and type:

 sudo apt install oneko  

After installation is complete, run this command in your terminal

 oneko 

Other options that can be used with this command:

• -tora - Makes cat into 'tora-neko' a cat with tiger-like stripes. 
• -dog - runs a dog instead of a cat.
• -sakura - runs sakura kinomoto instead of a cat.

You can check its man page for more options. 

espeak
It speaks out the text you give it.
Installation
Ubuntu 

 sudo apt install espeak  

To use it, write this in your terminal

 espeak "your text" 

Example

 espeak "I love linux"  

If you know any other terminal tricks/pranks, I'd love to see them in the comments below.