Box yourself in on the Linux command line

It's the holiday season, and every Linux terminal user deserves a little gift. It doesn't matter whether you celebrate Christmas, another holiday, or nothing at all. So I'm gathering together a collection of 24 Linux command-line toys over the next few weeks for you to enjoy and share with your friends. Let's have a little fun and add a little joy to a month that, at least here in the northern hemisphere, can be a little bit cold and dreary.

Chances are, there will be a few that you've heard of before. But, hopefully, we'll all have a chance to learn something new. (I know I did when doing some research to make sure I could make it to 24.)

The first of our 24 Linux terminal toys is a program called boxes. Why start with boxes? Because it's going to be hard to wrap up all of our other command-line presents to you without it!

On my Fedora machine, boxes wasn't installed by default, but it was in my normal repositories, so installing it was as simple as

$ sudo dnf install boxes -y

If you're on a different distribution, there's a good chance you'll find it in your default repositories as well.

Boxes a utility I really wish I had in my high school and college computer science courses, where well-intentioned teachers insisted I provide very specific looking comment at the beginning of every source file, function, code block, etc.

/***************/

/* Hello World */

/***************/

It turns out, once you add a few lines of text inside, formatting them can get, well, tedious. Enter boxes. Boxes is a simple utility for surrounding a block of text with an ASCII art-style box. It comes with defaults for source code commenting, as well as other options.

It's really easy to use. Using pipes, I can push a short greeting into a box.

$ cat greeting.txt | boxes -d diamonds -a c

Which will give us the output as follows:

/\          /\          /\

/\//\\/\    /\//\\/\    /\//\\/\

/\//\\\///\\/\//\\\///\\/\//\\\///\\/\

//\\\//\/\\///\\\//\/\\///\\\//\/\\///\\

\\//\/                            \/\\//

\/                                  \/

/\      I'm wishing you all a       /\

//\\     joyous holiday season      //\\

\\//     and a Happy Gnu Year!      \\//

\/                                  \/

/\                                  /\

//\\/\                            /\//\\

\\///\\/\//\\\///\\/\//\\\///\\/\//\\\//

\/\\///\\\//\/\\///\\\//\/\\///\\\//\/

\/\\//\/    \/\\//\/    \/\\//\/

\/          \/          \/

Or perhaps something more fun, like:

echo "I am a dog" | boxes -d dog -a c

Which will, unsurprisingly, give you the following:

__   _,--="=--,_   __

/  \."    .-.    "./  \

/  ,/  _   : :   _  \/` \

\  `| /o\  :_:  /o\ |\__/

`-'| :="~` _ `~"=: |

\`     (_)     `/

.-"-.   \      |      /   .-"-.

.---{     }--|  /,.-'-.,\  |--{     }---.

)  (_)_)_)  \_/`~-===-~`\_/  (_(_(_)  (

(              I am a dog               )

)                                     (

'---------------------------------------'

Boxes comes with lots of options for padding, position, and even processing regular expressions. You can learn more about boxes on the project's homepage , or head over to GitHub to download the source code or contribute your own box. In fact, if you're looking for an idea to submit, I've got an idea for you: why not a holiday present?

_  _

/_\/_\

_______\_\/_/_______

|       ///\\\       |

|      ///  \\\      |

|                    |

|     "Happy pull    |

|       request!"    |

|____________________|

Boxes is open source under a GPLv2 license.

Do you have a favorite command-line toy that you think I ought to profile? The calendar for this series is mostly filled out but I've got a few spots left. Let me know in the comments below, and I'll check it out. If there's space, I'll try to include it. If not, but I get some good submissions, I'll do a round-up of honorable mentions at the end.