The sys admin's daily grind – Prettyping and Asciiflow
Block Heroes
Columnist Charly is delighted that people still program useful tools for the terminal. Here, he looks at one tool that transforms boring ping data into colorful statistics and another that publishes a construction set for ASCII graphics on the network.
One weapon for command-line warriors is Prettyping [1], a shell script that wraps around the ping command. It reads its tasks, keeps a record of run times and packet losses, and shows at the command line in block graphics the average values since starting the tool and for the past 60 seconds (Figure 1).
The script runs on any system with Bash and Awk (i.e., also on OS X and probably also in the new Linux environment on Windows 10). Prettyping detects whether it is running in a terminal and how wide the terminal is, then scales the output accordingly. If you think the output is a little too clownish, you can switch to a more staid monochrome display using --nocolor. Prettyping passes on to ping any parameters that it isn't familiar with.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
AerynOS Alpha Release Available
With a choice of several desktop environments, AerynOS 2025.08 is almost ready to be your next operating system.
-
AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for more than two weeks.
-
RingReaper Malware Poses Danger to Linux Systems
A new kind of malware exploits modern Linux kernels for I/O operations.
-
Happy Birthday, Linux
On August 25, Linux officially turns 34.
-
VirtualBox 7.2 Has Arrived
With early support for Linux kernel 6.17 and other new additions, VirtualBox 7.2 is a must-update for users.
-
Linux Mint 22.2 Beta Available for Testing
Some interesting new additions and improvements are coming to Linux Mint. Check out the Linux Mint 22.2 Beta to give it a test run.
-
Debian 13.0 Officially Released
After two years of development, the latest iteration of Debian is now available with plenty of under-the-hood improvements.
-
Upcoming Changes for MXLinux
MXLinux 25 has plenty in store to please all types of users.
-
A New Linux AI Assistant in Town
Newelle, a Linux AI assistant, works with different LLMs and includes document parsing and profiles.
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Released with Minor Fixes
The latest Linux kernel doesn't really include any big-ticket features, just a lot of lines of code.