Okay, I may just be really bored, but I'm also curious as to what other users think is kind of uselessly "neat" about Linux. I'm not talking about things that have some particular purpose that are kind of cool or different than other OSs, I mean the kind of things only a diehard Linux geek would be amused by.

For my own submission, I offer up redirecting the mouse input to a console. It's a simple line of text, totally useless except for troubleshooting, yet I find myself playing around with it time and time again, just out of utter boredom.

Anybody else have anything similar, or am I just alone in this cold, cruel world?

A question that's so wacky it needs an answer.
Regards
Martin

Martin, that's downright mean! *applauds*

Well...in this category a lot of the wacky stuff from dotfiles.com would fit. Geek fun.


Håkan

Haven't done this one myself, but one of the DBA's at work "accidentally" did this to herself.

Add "exit" as the last line in someone's .profile. Sit back and watch the hilarity.

The one above, as well as (this requires the framebuffer to be enabled): while true; do cat /dev/urandom > /dev/fb0 2>/dev/null; done.

I dont think there is any TOTALLY uselss linux trick, everything exists for a reason, cause somewhere at some time a programmer thought they had some sort of reason to make that program or feature in a program.

one amusing thing in linux to me is the /proc filesystem, its intimidating at first but after a little exploring it becomes REALLY cool (nice in figuring out your hardware features/chipsets while configuring a kernel)

cat is also a rather amusing tool when used in conjunction with the /dev/ directory (cat /dev/urandom > /dev/tty7 #do this while in X)

Oh, cute, e1000...I had to relogin, because my shift key "stuck", meaning that no matter what I did with caps lock or whatever, it killed it. LOL! As it was urandom, I probably can't blame it entirely on you, but it's easier that way.

Which brings up another point, be careful with this kind of stuff, as you can toss info to your devices or system that it isn't capable (or willing) to handle, especially with randomizers.

Just a gentle warning to newbies. Myself, I love it when the system "throws me a fish", as it test my skill. I plan to retry this soon, to see how to fix it. For now, however, I have to reedit that novel I was working on...