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Comment by GiveOver | Hacker News Reader

One of those tweets prompted me to type "cat /dev/random" to see what happens. Mild panic as I was assaulted by a million lines of rapidly scrolling random text. Not sure what I expected.

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Not sure if it still works, but catting /dev/random to a sound device used to be a great way to test that your speakers were working by producing ear-splitting static noise.

You can: cat /dev/urandom | aplay

    cat /dev/urandom | aplay

Still works well on my machine, and I use it all the time to test :)

Ah, neat, but I seem to remember catting it to an actual device node, not to an executable.

You're thinking of /dev/dsp, which was an OSS thing before the move to ALSA. It still exists on the BSDs AFAIR but has to be emulated on modern Linux: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/103746/why-wont-lin...

Yep, that’s the one!

A more pleasant method could be: http://kmkeen.com/awk-music/

You're supposed to cat that to someone else's tty and then ask them about their experience.

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