Humor - Unix & Linux Pranks

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Unix & Linux pranks

Which harmless pranks do you know that would be great to play on your collegues?

/ humor

edited Oct 5 '10 at 15:06 community wiki2 revs, 2 users 100%Eimantas

7 – Harmless for them? Or harmless for you when they come find their revenge? Stefan Lasiewski Aug 12 '10 at 18:32

2 – Harmless to the system. Eimantas Aug 13 '10 at 3:34

by locked Michael Mrozek ♦ Jan 22 '12 at 19:50

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23 Answers

I do not know if this qualifies as a prank, but you can !watch StarWars on a shell

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

.About it

answered Aug 11 '10 at 5:51 community wikiMoeb

– I love that one! Swish Aug 11 '10 at 17:05

– Kicking! That is awesome! geoffc Aug 12 '10 at 1:03

–

If you enable the ASCII art output driver (colour optional) for you can watch the actual film in ASCII!mplayer

Troubadour Aug 20 '10 at 14:28

Install "sl". Choo choo! http://www.tkl.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~toyoda/index_e.html

==== ________ ___________

_D _| |_______/ \__I_I_____===__|_________|

|(_)--- | H\________/ | | =|___ ___| _________________

/ | | H | | | | ||_| |_|| _| \_____A

| | | H |__--------------------| [___] | =| |

| ________|___H__/__|_____/[][]~\_______| | -| |

|/ | |-----------I_____I [][] [] D |=======|____|________________________|_

__/ =| o |=-~~\ /~~\ /~~\ /~~\ ____Y___________|__|__________________________|_

|/-=|___|| || || || |_____/~\___/ |_D__D__D_| |_D__D__D_|

\_/ \__/ \__/ \__/ \__/ \_/ \_/ \_/ \_/ \_/

"SL (Steam Locomotive) runs across your terminal when you type "sl" as you meant to type'ls'. It's just a joke command, and not usefull at all. Put the binary to /usr/local/bin."

edited Aug 12 '10 at 14:59 community wiki2 revs, 2 users 88%invert

– This is essentially a duplicate of , but the engine has no way of indicating thatthis answer Michael Mrozek ♦ Oct 6 '10at 22:31

Sometimes I'll ssh into my machine at home and spook my wife (or the cat) by playing amessage over the speakers using festival text-to-speech.

humor - Unix & Linux pranks - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/232/unix-linux-pranks

1 of 6 1/26/2014 12:43 AM

echo "Helllloooo! Is anyone home?" | festival --tts

answered Aug 12 '10 at 16:15 community wikijjclarkson

– woww... that's kinda funny and kinda cruel... xenoterracide ♦ Aug 12 '10 at 23:31

5

–

I once had an IM conversation with my wife in which she typed her messages into IM and I typed my replies into anssh shell which spoke them to her. She nearly died laughing. It started when she was afk and I was trying to get herattention. She thought the computer had a virus. For a while I was pretending my replies were coming from thecomputer itself, as if she was having a conversation with it. Neil Mayhew Sep 10 '10 at 21:55

4 – - oh, thos happy days...dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/dsp polemon Sep 11 '10 at 6:38

Append this line to (assuming the default shell is bash)~/.bashrc

export PROMPT_COMMAND="cd"

No matter where the victim to, he/she will still end up in cd $HOME

From the bash man page:

PROMPT_COMMAND

If set, the value is executed as a command prior to issuing each

primary prompt.

answered Aug 11 '10 at 12:42 community wikiShawn Chin

cat<<EOF >> ~/.bashrc

alias cd='echo "Segmentation fault" && echo $* > /dev/null'

alias ls='echo "Segmentation fault"'

EOF

I'm sure you'd be able to find more creative variants of pranks.~/.bashrc

answered Aug 11 '10 at 7:31 community wikiAlex B

Not necessarily UNIX-specific, but I like modifying the file:/etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 google.com

127.0.0.1 slashdot.org

127.0.0.1 questionablecontent.net

et cetera, and then setting up Apache with an pointing to.

ErrorDocument 404 click_harder.html

this page

answered Aug 11 '10 at 10:50 community wikiLucas Jones

4 – I'm not sure sending them to an error page that says IE will work on a *nix user. xenoterracide ♦ Aug 12 '10 at23:30

1 – @xenoterracide: That's part of the prank. David Thornley Aug 13 '10 at 12:34

I've used inside my office to turn browser images upside down.this re-direction script prank

You'd be amazed to see how people panic when they think they've acquired some type of virus.

You can also use the prank to make images blurry (you choose the degree of blurriness),pretty funny when you don't overdo it -- people think their eyes are tired or the monitor is wonky.

answered Aug 11 '10 at 15:15 community wikiDan


2 of 6 1/26/2014 12:43 AM

– D'oh! Beat me to it :) Avery Payne Aug 12 '10 at 1:10

–

There is a verson of this in the chrome extention gallery too, easy to slide in somebodies computer when you sit downto browse. Caleb Oct 7 '10 at 11:47

...I'm not sure about harmless, but I once set my roommate's default runlevel to 6. That was anamusing afternoon (for me).

answered Aug 11 '10 at 7:42 community wikiMatt Simmons

– Lol. Brilliant. :) Lucas Jones Aug 11 '10 at 10:45

– Cruel and unusual. And oh so sweet. Caleb Oct 7 '10 at 11:46

Heres a harmless prank.

You will be surprised how many people dont know about the tty stop character. So when yourvictim leaves his or her terminal, stop the terminal using Ctrl-S (thats what it generally is, stty -awould show you the key on that terminal). And then when the victim comes back, he or she willbe trying hard to get the terminal back to life...

And if you find someone who keeps leaving his terminal.... you are really in luck!

answered Aug 11 '10 at 14:44 community wikiexecve

1

–

That's just evil. ;) I normally switch between using a Windows machine and often type when saving.. It's a painC-s

when you accidently hit it when ssh'ing to a linux machine.. Patrick Oct 6 '10 at 8:01

1 – For the record, you can return to normality by pressing Ctrl-C. badp Oct 6 '10 at 10:45

1

–

Aha, that's what to me! Thanks to @badp that I'm learning about now! But wait, happened Ctrl-C the answer there

tells us to use . Which is correct?Ctrl-Q imz -- Ivan Zakharyaschev Apr 27 '11 at 12:32

My favorite is logging in to a nearby computer and playing cricket or frog sounds.

While working away in Miami FL, I had my whole family, back in Oregon, searching for a frog inthe garage.

answered Aug 11 '10 at 14:13 community wikiStephen Jazdzewski

Back in school, in the CS lab (sun workstations at the time) I compiled mpg123 from source inmy home directory (that was fun) and then whenever anyone would walk out of the lab (w/outlocking their workstation), I would modify their .cshrc (the workstations default shell) to play"Imagine" by John Lennon whenever they logged in. It amused me to no end hearing that song,playing ever so quietly (the workstations only had internal speakers) from all over the lab anytime of day or night that I walked in.

answered Aug 11 '10 at 14:38 community wikigabe.

alias cd="eject -T"

In ~/.${shell}rc

echo "sleep 1" >>~/.${shell}rc

Such fun :)

edited Jan 20 '12 at 13:49 community wiki2 revs, 2 users 86%Blue Peppers


3 of 6 1/26/2014 12:43 AM

One I really like is to alias ls="sl" (requires sl installed, which may or may not be a problem).

For those not in the know, sl is a program that, being a common typo of ls, was created to trainyou out of typing sl. It displays a rolling choo choo train, that you can't break out of with C-c orC-d (unless is passed).-e

You can even make it do different things with some parameters. Per sl(6):

OPTIONS

-a An accident seems to happen. You'll feel pity for people who cry for help.

-l shows little one.

-F It flies.

-e Allow interrupt by Ctrl+C.

I don't recommend using -e if you're going to mess with your coworkers, but the rest havesome serious laugh potential.

answered Aug 11 '10 at 15:24 community wikiB.R.

Back in the days of terminal-only systems, I created a program that simulated the loginprogram but just kept saying, "Login incorrect". I then set it running on a colleague's terminalwhile he was at lunch.

When he came back, he got really confused and panicked wondering if his password hadchanged or something, and actually called me over to ask me to help him with the problem. Istarted to make all sorts of plausible-sounding but useless suggestions for things he might try,and was able to get away with sounding completely innocent for several minutes, until finally hesmelled a rat when I ran out of reasonable suggestions and started saying some trulyoutlandish things! We then had a good laugh over it together.

answered Sep 10 '10 at 22:08 community wikiNeil Mayhew

This one works great on Windows, but can be applied to KDE or Gnome as well:

Open some programs, just so it looks like a normal work session1.

Make a screenshot of the whole desktop with all apps running2.

Set all panels (or under windows the start bar) to hidden3.

Move all Desktop icons to a folder outside the desktop4.

Set the screenshot as desktop background image5.

It will look as if the computer completely hangs, however in fact it is working perfectly well. If youare especially mean, you might have in the screenshot a Firefox window with a tillating orembarrassing web site. (Don't do this in the office.)

answered Oct 5 '10 at 18:05 community wikifschmitt

Way back when I was in university, working late night on a project on a Unix terminal (just a tty,not X Windows), all of a sudden messages like "Are you hungry?" "Why are you still working?""Deadline is tomorrow, just give up & go to sleep!" started appearing on my screen.

Turns out a buddy was across the room, 'ing or 'ing to my terminal's device( ) -- the messages showed up directly on my terminal, without any kind ofattribution (unlike or ).

cat echo

/dev/pts/<whatever>

write wall

These days systems are more locked down, I doubt it's as easy to find writeable terminaldevices. Unfortunately this was many many years ago, so I haven't tried it in a long time,maybe there is a different way to do it now.

edited Aug 11 '10 at 15:16 community wiki2 revsDan


4 of 6 1/26/2014 12:43 AM

– This actually works fine nowadays still :D badp Oct 6 '10 at 10:48

For emacs users, there's the nefariously evil which makes the victim thinktheir keyboard has weird problems.

broken-keyboard.el

answered Aug 12 '10 at 0:49 community wikidurin42

Add to .inputrc:

"nano": "vi"

"vi": "emacs"

"cd": "ls"

answered Jan 20 '12 at 11:11 community wikigrawity

This one guy came up with a list of aliases that could be put in .bashrc when interviewingsomeone for a linux/unix sysadmin job position. I'll post the full list of aliases here, but if youwish you can read the full article . I find it to be quite funny..here

PS1="youAreHere/ "

export PS1

alias --='-'

alias ash='echo youAreHere/ '

alias bash='echo youAreHere/ '

alias cat='perl -l'

alias cd='cd .'

alias cp='echo cp'

alias csh='echo youAreHere/ '

alias df='echo /dev/dump 100% 100% 0% /tmp/jailfs/hoosegow/you'

alias echo='echo '

alias emacs='ed'

alias env='vmstat'

alias ex='ed'

alias exec='echo cannot fork'

alias exit='echo are you sure?'

alias id='echo user$me$ group$sadly the same$'

alias joe='ed'

alias jsh='echo youAreHere/ '

alias kill='echo all dead'

alias ksh='echo youAreHere/ '

alias less='more ---x'

alias logout='echo are you sure?'

alias ls='echo .'

alias mkdir='echo making directory'

alias more='less </dev/null'

alias mv='echo stay'

alias netstat='cat /dev/random'

alias ping='ping /dev/null'

alias prompt='echo youAreHere/'

alias ps='echo you 501 501 0 Apr 1 ? 0:00 /usr/bin/vicks -vaporub'

alias pwd='echo you are here'

alias rm='echo can\'\''t find'

alias rmdir='removing directory'

alias set='iostat'

alias sh='echo youAreHere/ '

alias su='echo cannot su to'

alias sudo='exec'

alias touch='echo please don\'\''t touch'

alias unalias='echo no aliases found named'

alias vi='ed'

alias vim='ed'

alias w='echo x, y and z'

alias who='echo what?'

alias zsh='echo youAreHere/ '

# alias alias="sleep 5" # Uncommenting that last line is optional ;)


5 of 6 1/26/2014 12:43 AM

answered Jan 20 '12 at12:53

community wikipootzko

Most remembered prank that I ever played on others were two, while I was studying.

1. Wrote a wrapper which would ask for user's password and stash them into a writeablefile for me and then proceed to normal . At the end, I would have all the collection ofuser's password in the network and used to somehow tease them with whatever the user'spassword would refer to symbolically intimating them that I am aware of their passwords. Itwas fun though :-))

su

su

2. I deployed a cgi script on a http instance that would in disguise, collect user's passwordsaying that the authentication is by system and they would happily share their passwordsto cgi script which would store them in a text file.

Had a nice fun, both related to password trickery. I would not encourage this now. As I am nowin the shoes of System Administrator and strictly discourage people sharing their passwordsnot even on web. If doubtful, contact SysAdm for legitimacy of the site in the local network.

answered Jan 20 '12 at 14:09 community wikiNikhil Mulley

set DISPLAY variable to their PC name/IP.open debug (wdb) windows to someones PC and they are confused whats happing. Of coursetheir PC should have xwin running and xhost +.

answered Aug 11 '10 at 6:13 community wikiHemant

Works for X11 displays, if you can get to it, with "shortcuts" on the desktop:

Add a folder on the desktop, call it " ".1. Horse porn

Use GIMP to take a screen shop of the whole desktop.2.

Set the screen shot you took in step two as the wallpaper.3.

Delete the " " folder. You should still see the folder as it is part of the screenshot set as a wallpaper.

4. Horse porn

Get stop watch and see how long it takes $user to work it out.5.

Works on Windows(TM) too.

answered Jan 20 '12 at 11:31 community wikiSardathrion

:(){ :|:& }: //at your terminal

: Its a ! But you should try it once ; )Warning fork bomb

A fork bomb is a process that clones (forks) itself, the clone then does the same, and thoseclones do the same, etc etc. It grows exponentially until all system resources are consumed,and the system hangs. It's a real nasty piece of work, and not a prank by any means.

edited Aug 12 '10 at 14:51 community wiki2 revs, 2 users 57%N 1.1

6 – THIS IS NOT HARMLESS AND BREAKS THINGS! wzzrd Aug 12 '10 at 10:11

2 –

This is a good use for Virtualization. Get a guest running on your KVM/Virtualbox instance, and try this-- you canalways reboot. It's an educational opportunity. Stefan Lasiewski Aug 12 '10 at 18:18

– Oh, there's ways to make this attack harmless... But the fix is worse than the cure. :( Arafangion Oct 5 '10 at 14:20

– How does it work? Kevin Cantu Oct 5 '10 at 18:21

1 – Ahhh, even Bash allows as a function name. Although seems necessary...: :(){ :|:& };: Kevin Cantu Oct

5 '10 at 18:47


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