Type 'ls' wrong on Linux. Watch what happens

🚂 Type 'ls' wrong on Linux and a steam locomotive drives across your screen.

No, really....

Meet sl, one of the greatest typo punishments ever written.


𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗯𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝘁
Back in the early 1990s, a Japanese programmer named Toyoda Masashi got tired of mistyping ls (the command to list files) as sl and getting a boring "command not found" error.

So he did what any reasonable developer would do: he wrote a program that punishes you for the mistake in the most delightful way possible.

Type sl by accident? A full ASCII steam locomotive comes chugging across your terminal and you can't skip it. You just have to sit there and watch it. That's the whole point.

It went viral in Unix circles, got packaged into Linux repos worldwide, and has been trolling sysadmins ever since.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

𝗜𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘁

Open the terminal and type the linux command based on your favorite Linux destribution:

• Debian / Ubuntu → sudo apt install sl
• Fedora / RHEL  → sudo dnf install sl
• Arch Linux    → sudo pacman -S sl


𝗙𝗹𝗮𝗴𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗵 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗶𝗻𝗴
Flags are sometimes known as options or switches.
sl isn't just one train. It comes with options:

-a → Passengers appear in the windows screaming for help 🆘
-l → A smaller, little locomotive 🚂
-F → The train flies across the screen ✈️
-e → Lets you interrupt it with Ctrl+C (cheating, but valid) 😅

The -a flag is the fan favourite. Highly recommended.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

sl is a 30-year-old program with zero productivity value and it's still being maintained, still packaged, and still making people smile when they fat-finger a command.

That's the Linux spirit in a nutshell.

Install it on your homelab server. Your future self will appreciate the company during late-night SSH sessions. 🚂

Have you stumbled across sl before? Drop a 🚂 in the comments.