XKCD Deploys Command Line Interface

ipquickly was one of a large number of users to note that the best on-line comic has just got a little better with the addition of a command line interface. You can also sign the petition to make the CLI permanent.

Comments

Dear Slashdot,

[Jurily]

that was funny. Learn from him.

Re:Dear Slashdot,

[Anonymous Coward]

up up down down left right left right b a

do it a bunch of times

Re:Dear Slashdot,

[Jurily]

Flamewar time!

guest@xkcd:/$ vi

You should really use emacs.

guest@xkcd:/$ emacs

You should really use vim.

guest@xkcd:/$ ed

You are not a diety.

guest@xkcd:/$ nano

You should really use an editor.

Re:Dear Slashdot,

[plasticsquirrel]

Right, the last time Slashdot changed, it was just for a "new" layout. And the new layout just looked like the old layout, but with crawling JavaScript. The butt ugly pine-green-on-white was never even questioned. To get some volunteer graphic designers together for a new conceptual look would have made too much sense.

Also, Arial? WTF, Slashdot? At least pick Verdana or Georgia in the stylesheets, two decent web fonts that ship with Windows. And why haven't we ever been able to post limited pre-formatted snippets of code? Not to mention some sort of glyph coverage beyond ASCII...?

Re:Dear Slashdot,

[zx-15]

Even better:
  guest@xkcd:/$ whoami
  You are Richard Stallman.
Also, a rather weird command execution:

guest@xkcd:/$ kill

Terminator deployed to 1984

But,

guest@xkcd:/$ kill 1

Unrecognized command. Type "help" for assistance.

Command parser definitely needs some work

guest@xkcd:/$ sudo -i

sudo: -i: command not found

Also I demand, while, for, if and which.

Re:Dear Slashdot,

[Thoguth]

Shell shortcuts work, and the sandwich joke is in there, too...

guest@xkcd:/$ make me a sandwich

What? Make it yourself.

guest@xkcd:/$ sudo !!

sudo make me a sandwich

Okay.

Re:Dear Slashdot,

[nxtw]

Also, Arial? WTF, Slashdot? At least pick Verdana or Georgia in the stylesheets, two decent web fonts that ship with Windows.

Slashdot's not using Arial, it's using the browser's default sans-serif font. For me, this is Helvetica.

Re:Dear Slashdot,

[RalphSleigh]

Right now for me it is:

font-family:arial,sans-serif;

Which is arial for me and anyone that has it installed, regardless of your browsers default choice (Calibri here) . If you are getting Helvetica you are probably using a mac.

Brings up a interesting point, is there an addon/other way to make Firefox not use arial even if its installed and the page explicitly requests it?

Re:Dear Slashdot,

[rolfwind]

$ make love

I put on my robe and wizard hat.

In this day and age...

[Dripdry]

It would feel delicious, to me, that right when the iPad comes out, designed for people to consume more ephemeral and pointless information than ever, that a site like this would make itself slightly more exclusive by moving backwards on the user interface timeline.

Bless your heart, xkcd!

Re:In this day and age...

[Drinking Bleach]

I support web sites that force both hands to be doing something. At least it makes us look more productive.

Re:In this day and age...

[garvon]

I work in the internet porn industry and we go for sites that can be surfed one handed.

No tab completion!

[Anonymous Coward]

What is a shell without tab complete?!? Even Windows supports it.

Re:No tab completion!

[dgatwood]

That's okay. They made up for it by occasionally disabling your backspace key, though it would have been better if they had inserted ^H, too. Or maybe that was just a random glitch.

Re:No tab completion!

[QRDeNameland]

What is a shell without tab complete?!? Even Windows supports it.

However, I was impressed that it implemented up-down arrow command history, and even "ls".

I tried "rm -rf /" but permission was denied. :-)

Re:No tab completion!

[robot256]

Randall certainly didn't make it easy to parse, though. There's no line breaks and all there a dozen different constructions for the commands.

Re:No tab completion!

[schnablebg]

The code is GPL'd and on Gitbub.

http://github.com/chromakode/xkcdfools

Wait...this is a real story.

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot has completely missed the point of April fools day. They posted a REAL story in amongst the entire useless days worth of fake ones.

uname

[Anonymous Showered]

guest@xkcd:/$ uname
Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator

and

guest@xkcd:/$ su
God mode activated. Remember, with great power comes great ... aw, screw it, go have fun.

I lol'ed.

Re:uname

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

try wget http://google.com/

it creates and iframe and loads the URL in there.

sudo

[ZX3 Junglist]

sudo make me a sandwich
Okay.
http://xkcd.com/149/

Oblig. Sandwich.

[Anonymous Showered]

guest@xkcd:/$ make me a sandwich
What? Make it yourself.
guest@xkcd:/$ sudo make me a sandwich
Okay.
guest@xkcd:/$

Whatever you do don't "go south"

[pcx]

The new format is a bit more adventurous than it looks at first blush.

WGET!

[Anonymous Showered]

# wget http://www.xkcd.com/

You're going to love it.

Re:Hasn't everyone written a bogus shell at some t

[mjschultz]

I spent way too much time after I tried the most natural command line program `look`. Yeah, there is a tiny game in there too. Also, you still don't want to `sudo rm -rf /` cause then you'll have to restart the page.

Shutdown?

[CapOblivious2010]

Try "sudo shutdown"

Re:Hasn't everyone written a bogus shell at some t

[mikael_j]

"sudo su -" doesn't work but "sudo make me a sandwich" does.

Other fun things to do

[Virak]

• Typing cat with an argument, naturally dumps that file to stdout. Typing cat without an argument does something entirely different.
• On a semi-related note, typing "find kitten" lets you find kitten.
• rm -rf / doesn't work because, like on any good *nix system, you're not normally running as root.
• But you can use sudo with this (and several other things) to do it anyway.
• apt-get upgrade (don't forget the sudo) will gladly suggest an upgrade to you if you're using Internet Explorer.
• Both vim and emacs are available, in a manner.
• man doesn't provide help for most commands, but it does provide some amusing responses for some of them.
• Try typing "look".
• Various commands don't really do anything, but provide amusing responses. Try ping, ssh, ed, kill, or asl.
• There's a command for people who read the source code (along with, you know, the names of all the other commands), but you should find that on your own.
• And many, many more!

Re:Other fun things to do

[TubeSteak]

Everything is containted in this javascript:
http://www.xkcd.com/unixkcd/xkcd_cli_all.js

You can root around to figure out some of the more obscure commands.

Re:Other fun things to do

[creepynut]

If you get it from here it's a little more readable: http://github.com/chromakode/xkcdfools/blob/master/xkcd_cli.js

(found via the "source code" link at the bottom of xkcd.com)

Re:Other fun things to do

[MagicM]

The Konami code is anything but obscure my good man...

And it is also awsome.

Re:Potty brain...

[ShadowRangerRIT]

You missed:

guest@xkcd:/$ go up
You cannot go up.
guest@xkcd:/$ go down
On our first date?

I read the source code.

[Joeseph64]

And by reading the source code, I found out that "I read the source code" yields a text heart.

Also, I cheated and read all the other commands you can use. (They're near the bottom of that file.)

undocumented commands I've seen:

[pushing-robot]

(most taken from the xkcd forum thread)

of course, (sudo) make me a sandwich
uname
su
sudo shutdown
sudo reboot
logout
pwd
lpr
clear
rm -rf /
find kitten
buy stuff
echo
finger
goto
date
irc/wget/curl
wget/curl xkcd.com
ping
vi/vim/emacs/nano
apt-get (moo)
sudo apt-get (update/upgrade/dist-upgrade)
moo
hello (joshua)
man (help) (cat) (last) (next)
go (west) (east) (south) (north)
look
light (lamp)
xyzzy
whoami
i read the source code
asl
cheat
buy stuff

Re:retro

[ElectricTurtle]

Yeah, because all of this could be done with plain HTML, obviously. Of course it's scripted. What do people expect?

Re:retro

[thetoadwarrior]

yeah well there is life fucking ruined for all of us.

Re:Potty brain...

[Petrushka]

guest@xkcd:/$ look
You are at a computer using unixkcd.

Exits: west, south
guest@xkcd:/$ go west
Life is peaceful there.

Exits: east, west
guest@xkcd:/$ go west
In the open air.

Exits: east, west
guest@xkcd:/$ go west
Where the skies are blue.

Exits: east, west
guest@xkcd:/$ go west
This is what we're gonna do.

Exits: east, west
guest@xkcd:/$ go west
Sun in wintertime.

Exits: east, west
guest@xkcd:/$ go west
We will do just fine.

Yes, but

[bit9]

I've written a couple different fake shells, but usually just as a practical joke. Such as: C:\ > dir WARNING, ALL DATA ON NON-REMOVABLE DISK DRIVE C: WILL BE LOST! Proceed with Format? y Formatting 248.9 GB...3% I've also written a BSOD screensaver, which was really fun. I also once hacked someone's existing screensaver to throw in an occasional subliminal message like "Do it." or "Kill him." Oh, and don't forget the ol' replacing someone's desktop background with a screen-shot of their old desktop, and then deleting all the icons. That's always good for a few laughs.

Re:Yes, but

[veganboyjosh]

Not a prank since it was my own computer, but I once had a desktop at work with the image set as a screensaver being a screenshot of the same desktop. the icons were only slightly out of kilter, so it wasn't always obvious which ones were real or not. In a few weeks, the icons on the desktop changed, and it was more confusing.

my boss hated it.

Re:Yes, but

[TheThiefMaster]

I may have recreated the windows login screen once.

It didn't actually work, of course. It always error'd when they tried to login, but it caught a fair few people whose usernames and passwords were identical.

Possible bug?

[benedictaddis]

rm store works even though it's a folder. Is this a bug?

Already permanent.

[Anonymous Coward]

guest@xkcd:/$ hint

This terminal will remain available at http://xkcd.com/unixkcd/

The petition people need to use the source, luke.

(hint is a random reply command, try it several times for that comment)

Re:Hasn't everyone written a bogus shell at some t

[jc42]

Well, "sudo make me a sandwich" works only in the minimal sense of replying "Okay."

I'd have been more impressed if it replied "Okay, you're a sandwich."

it is now April 2nd @ 12:01 AM EDT

[waterwingz]

fun all done

Re:Potty brain...

[Broken Wind]

I went west... life was peaceful there. Then I got eaten by a grue.

Re:retro

[Sir_Lewk]

You do realize that HTML is just a Markup Language right?

Re:Hasn't everyone written a bogus shell at some t

[nlewis]

It's gone now.

It's not completely gone - it's just been relocated here.

Cool interface...

[BrokenHalo]

Just for curiosity's sake, I tried

whoami
and got
You are Richard Stallman.

And "pwd" yields
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

The petition is unnecessary...

[headLITE]

...it's still there if you use this link: http://xkcd.com/unixkcd/

Re:The petition is unnecessary...

[The Aethereal]

Not working for me either in FF or IE. Though I get no js errors. Just a prompt where I can't type anything.

Re:retro

[Sir_Lewk]

I think that is quite possibly the worst possible way something like this could possibly have been implemented. Congrats.