Sl: a steam locomotive in your terminal

On the Sun/Solaris machines where I first worked, the `sl` command had an added bonus: it played a really loud "choo-choo" sound from the workstation's internal speaker, regardless of volume or mute settings, so you always knew when someone fat-fingered their file listings, and much laughing was had by all.

I very quickly learned to alias sl=ls in my shell rc, and it's still in there to this day, just in case...

    > The following code changes the default behaviour of ls from listing
    > files to turning your terminal into an unstoppable steam locomotive.
    > The only way to end it is closing the terminal, so use this with caution.

erm, that's easily stopped:

    [ctrl]+z
    $ pkill -9 sl

That is optimizing for the short term. "When I've run sl, I clearly wanted ls, so you should give me that (even if you also punish me)."

Optimizing for the long term is also plausible. "Don't reward me for making mistakes (even if you also punish me) because it'll dilute my muscle-memory training, and I'll be more likely to make mistakes in the future."

Neither of these is inherently more correct than the other. The long term has more uncertainty, but greater potential rewards. We just have to make a judgment call.

I tend to favor the long-term approach for sl. I can't easily quantify how valuable my stricter muscle-memory training will be, but I can imagine the possibility of a significant upside if I actually become a more precise typer. Also, the worst-case downside just isn't that bad -- retyping ls just isn't that hard.

erm, no? "while true; sl; done"

"Note: I actually didn't use a marquee for this. The one good use for one, and I missed it. Damn."

Is this even a good example for using html marquee?