CLI programs that show "Hacker-like" terminal output [closed]

The tool to do that trick is cmatrix. As far as I know, cmatrix is included in the repository of most Linux distros so installing it is a piece of cake. If you use Ubuntu or any other similar distro, just run this command to install cmatrix:

sudo apt-get install cmatrix

In Arch Linux, the installing command will be:

sudo pacman -S cmatrix

After you get cmatrix installed, to know what it looks like, just open the terminal and run the cmatrix command and the matrix will start running on your terminal. To stop the matrix, just hit the "q" key.

Rather than the default green + black you can also change it to blue and black, IMO it looks a lot smarter.

Command: cmatrix -BC blue

Source + info: http://www.asty.org/cmatrix/

You can prepare a list of "important looking output command" and have then run at random.

For example, create a file commands containing one command per line :

ping -c 4 www.google.fr
lspci
lsmod
ifconfig
dmesg | tail -n 15

You can add the displaying of parts of logs, depending of your distribution (on my gentoo I may had tail -n 15 /var/log/emerge.log, etc...).

Then just have them run at random non stop by launching something like :

while true; do sh -c "$(shuf -n 1 /path/to/file/commands)"; sleep 0.5; done

Depending what command you put in the command list, you might need to run it from a root shell.

In one of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo movies (I think the Swedish one) during a "hacker scene" Lisbeth had a terminal open on her Mac and it looked like it was just the output of ls -R on a Linux system (maybe they used ssh to make it go slower) (and yes, I mean Linux, because I don't think Mac OS X has aspell libraries).

Personally, I would try the output of compiling something from source, preferably something with some dependencies. You can probably use your package management system for this, but I don't know what distro you're using. I used to run a Gentoo system and even though compiling something like OpenOffice.org (as we used then) or Firefox from source took a long time, I still get a warm hacker-feeling from watching something compile.

Something else you might try is the console output from an IRC client. Not the chat rooms themselves but the output from the server with all the archaic control messages and the MOTD's and such. Especially if the feeling you're going for is hacker communications and not just hacker computer program output.

If you want to be super-authentic (à la The Matrix Reloaded, I'd suggest downloading Kali Linux and set up a box to hack into, or at least use nmap and some SQL database, but pretty much anything done on the command line looks l33t to the masses.