lolcat: a tool to rainbow color Linux terminal

Paint your command outputs with rainbow color! Use lolcat (Ruby gem) tool and add some spice to the black putty terminal!

Another article to have some fun on your Linux terminal. In the past, we have seen few articles about fun in Linux terminal –

• Beautiful ASCII banners in Linux
• Hollywood movie Matrix like green falling code in Linux terminal

In this article, we will cover lolcat command which colors your terminal texts in rainbow fashion! See below GIF to start with –

See how lolcat command colors output in rainbow color scheme!

lolcat is available at its Git Repository for download. Lets setup lolcat on your server.

How to install lolcat tool

lolcat is Ruby gem hence you need to install Ruby first. Install packages rubygems ruby-devel & ruby on your system using yum or apt-get. Once successfully install, download the latest version of lolcat  from its Git repository using wget and any Linux downloader.

Once downloaded, unzip it

# unzip master.zip
Archive:  master.zip
dfc68649f6bdac255d5be052d2123f3fbe3f555c
   creating: lolcat-master/
 extracting: lolcat-master/.gitignore
  inflating: lolcat-master/Gemfile
  inflating: lolcat-master/LICENSE
  inflating: lolcat-master/README.md
 extracting: lolcat-master/Rakefile
   creating: lolcat-master/ass/
  inflating: lolcat-master/ass/screenshot.png
   creating: lolcat-master/bin/
  inflating: lolcat-master/bin/lolcat
   creating: lolcat-master/lib/
  inflating: lolcat-master/lib/lolcat.rb
   creating: lolcat-master/lib/lolcat/
  inflating: lolcat-master/lib/lolcat/cat.rb
  inflating: lolcat-master/lib/lolcat/lol.rb
 extracting: lolcat-master/lib/lolcat/version.rb
  inflating: lolcat-master/lolcat.gemspec

and install it using Ruby gems.

# cd lolcat-master/bin
# gem install lolcat
Successfully installed lolcat-42.24.0
Parsing documentation for lolcat-42.24.0
1 gem installed

This confirms your successful installation of lolcat!

lolcat command to rainbow color output!

Its time to see lolcat in action. You can pipe it with any output of your choice and it will color your command output in rainbow color (a few examples below)!

# ps -ef |lolcat
# date | lolcat

Want some more fun?

lolcat comes with few options which will make it more fun on the terminal. Run command with -d and duration and it will color your output in running mode.

You can even combine it with text banners like figlet or toilet and have fun!