Light-Hearted Holiday Season Post #3

In this time of chaos, tumult, and constant change, I’ve decided that a little light-hearted Holiday Season levity is in order.  With that in mind, during this week of Christmas I’m posting a small series of somewhat strange and superfluous oddities for your enjoyment, until I come back to the regular posting schedule in 2011.  Enjoy…  And Happy Holidays…

Around the Thanksgiving holiday break, my 6 year old daughter and I were goofing around with my Opensuse laptop.  I was showing her how bash scripts work, and how they can do goofy fun things with only a moment’s effort.

I asked her what she thought she wanted the computer to do for her, and she said something to the effect that she wanted it to count for her, like in hide-and-go-seek, so she didn’t have to.  So we got to work…

Of course, the goal was to keep it simple, but we revised a few times until it would say and show the numbers it was counting, plus allow her to be prompted to enter the “in-between word”, like hippopotamus or Mississippi, or whatever her imagination desired.

So here you go, this is the result of our afternoon of goofy daddy-daughter fun.  And then she spent like the next hour running it with all possible number ranges, and every word (or words) you can imagine.

Just copy the following contents into a file, flag it executable (chmod 700), and run it.  I hope you enjoy it as much as we did…

#!/bin/bash
COUNTER=1

clear
echo ""
echo "How high do you wish to count?: "
read MAX

echo ""
echo "What word(s) do you want to count with?: "
read WORD

while [ $COUNTER -le $MAX ]
do
clear
echo "$COUNTER $WORD"
espeak -p 70 -s 200 "$COUNTER $WORD"
COUNTER=`expr $COUNTER + 1`
done

clear
echo "Thanks for playing with me!"
espeak -p 70 -s 200 "Thanks for playing with me!"
echo ""

😉

2 Comments

  1. philip

    I like these holiday posts!
    Can’t you continue them in the new year?!

    Nice holidays,

    Philip

  2. Jeremy Pavlov

    @philip

    Hmm… Interesting thought!

    Same to you,
    – Jeremy

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