busy

Here’s a command that I posted on my main blog last year. Open a terminal and give it a try (stop it with Ctrl+C)!
$ cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -C | grep "34 32"

`The Penguin' says...

I recently posted a command to “Look Busy On *nix“:
$ cat /dev/urandom | hexdump -C | grep "34 32"

If you ran it, you console/terminal screen should have been filled with lines like these:

I will break apart the command and explain what it actually did.

$: Indicates that this command should be run as a regular user (i.e. without root privileges). This isn’t actually part of the command and shouldn’t be included when typing it into the shell.
cat
: Output the contents of the specified file(s) to stdout.
/dev/urandom: The file from which to read. /dev/urandom is a special file that acts as a pseudo-random number generator.
|: Redirects or “pipes” the output of the previous command into the input of the next command (stdout to stdin).
hexdump: Outputs a hexdump of the specified file, or stdin if no file specified.
-C: From the man page: