Linux Command Line Snow and Rain Simulator

My favorite twitter feed at the moment is climagic. He posts an assortment of great little scripts and other cli tips and tweaks at least a few times a week. One of the neatest things things he posted in a long while is his bash ascii snow simulator.

The code for it is below:

c=$(tput cols);clear;while :;do echo $(tput lines) $c $(($RANDOM%$c));sleep 0.1;done|gawk '{a[$3]=0;for(x in a){o=a[x];a[x]=a[x]+1;printf"\033[%s;%sH ",o,x;printf"\033[%s;%sH*\033[0;0H",a[x],x;}}'

I've modified it a very little bit and made a rainy windsheild simulator as well:

c=$(tput cols);clear;while :;do echo $(tput lines) $c $(($RANDOM%$c));sleep 0.1;done|gawk '{a[$3]=0;for(x in a){o=a[x];a[x]=a[x+1]+1;printf"\033[%s;%sH ",o,x;printf"\033[%s;%sH.\033[0;0H",a[x],x;}}'

The most interesting part of these to me is how few characters it takes to generate something so visually interesting. These scripts can be shortened a bit if you are running them from the command line by removing the c variable for columns, but when running from a script this variable isn't passed so I've left it in.

Particularly fun has been running the snow simulator on an old-style television with a Raspberry Pi with the font size way way up.